HERE’S HOW ‘THE DUFF’S’ TRIP WAS TORCHED
Why, there was no booth, no room, no single event, big enough to contain them both — Mike Duffy and the Olympic torch, that is.
The wily torch is the reason the suspended P.E.I. senator claims his appearance at the Saanich Fair on Vancouver Island six years ago was cancelled “last minute,” leaving him in the lurch to explain a taxpayer-paid $8,000 trip out west for “Senate business” that never materialized.
The fair was the only rationale ever offered in Duffy’s diaries for the Sept. 5 to 8, 2009 trip. Duffy merely reported the visit was “cancelled.”
That he blamed the torch was revealed Friday through an email he sent former Conservative MP Gary Lunn last year.
As the then-local MP, Lunn had been involved in the aborted fair visit, which he deemed no big deal either way.
But on Oct. 30, 2014, Duffy — by then suspended by his fellow senators and charged with the fraud, breach of trust and bribery offences for which he’s now on trial — wrote him and appeared, to put it politely, to be trying to nudge Lunn’s memory in the right direction.
Explaining that his lawyer would like a few words with him about “the event Labour Day weekend in 2009,” Duffy offered this helpful aide-mémoire.
“I had flown out for the Saanich Fair, as you had requested, but the last minute, my appearance at your event was dropped,” he said.
“My memory is you and your team decided that since you had the Olympic torch, my presence wasn’t needed. It was a last-minute call, but that’s the way it is in politics.”
He also managed to paint himself as such an adult about it all; why, he’d been around politics; he understood how this stuff worked and bore no grudges.
In other words, since the Conservatives already had one big crowd-pleaser in the torch — Lunn was then the minister of sports and had arranged in advance of the Vancouver Olympics for a torch prototype to be present at the party’s booth at the fair and fairgoers went wild for it — they’d been able to wave off another, the Duff, as the 69-yearold called himself.
Lunn didn’t answer Duffy’s note, wisely not wanting to come within a mile of the swirling Senate expenses scandal.
But he poured cold water all over the notion of the torch oneupping Duffy.
“If anything,” he told prosecutor Mark Holmes, “that (the torch) would have been more of a reason to have him there. … They’re both draws. That may be Mr. Duffy’s memory, but this was a very casual arrangement … it never got solidified. It just wasn’t a big deal.”
In fact, Lunn said, his own memory was that at some point it became clear that Duffy wanted the local riding association to pick up the tab (presumably for the Vancouver-Victoria leg of the trip, since the Senate covered the rest), and when the association declined, that was that.
Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt has already heard that the fair is popular with political parties of all stripes, and that with the Conservatives at least, the usual deal was that if a cabinet minister or big name was going to be out west anyway, the local riding association would ask if he wanted to stop by.
But this was only ever a casual arrangement with Duffy, Lunn said, “no details were ever finalized,” and the arrangements fell apart “a couple of weeks” before the fair.
He was of course savaged in cross-examination by Don Bayne, Duffy’s lawyer, who suggested his memory was so vague as to be unreliable, and who petulantly read aloud, word for word including all the “uhs” and “ers,” of the transcribed statement Lunn had given the RCMP, after the prosecutor said Bayne had been leaving out some of the context.
Lunn didn’t mention the expense difficulty as the reason for the cancellation in that statement, but in fairness to him, he understood that the question the police wanted him to answer was whether Duffy had attended or not. Certainly, Lunn appeared to bear Duffy no ill will, and several times volunteered how popular and sought-after as a speaker he was in the Tory caucus.
“And I liked Mr. Duffy,” Lunn said once. “And I still like Mr. Duffy.”
Prosecutors allege this trip was purely a personal one, a family reunion for the Duffys, and certainly the diaries appear to bear that out — they are full of references to Duffy and his wife attending their daughter’s play, having dinner with “the kids” (their son and daughter and spouses) and otherwise cooling their heels at the Vancouver Four Seasons.
The trial resumes Monday.