TORY GURU MADE HIM DO IT, DUFFY SAYS

Senator tells his criminal trial that Sen. Tkachuk told him to make claims

Mike Duffy has now formally invoked what might be called the battered senator defence.

Like its better- known relative, battered- woman syndrome, this one involves the wholesale abdication of any personal responsibility.

It is also redolent of what could be called the Shaggy defence, after the reggae singer’s 2000 hit called It Wasn’t Me, wherein a fellow caught in flagrante delicto ( or, as Shaggy inimitably put it, “banging on the bathroom floor”) with the girl next door by his woman is advised by a male friend to simply deny it, and say, against the incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that it wasn’t him. Essentially, the Prince Edward Island senator in his second day of testimony at his criminal trial acknowledged, if never the wrongness let alone criminality of what he’s accused of, much of the actual conduct.

Yes, he filed for every allowable sou; yes, he filled out forms year after year swearing that his primary residence was in P. E. I. when he and the country knew it was in Ottawa; yes, he claimed to be on “travel status” when living in the familiar comforts of his bungalow in the National Capital Region.

But, he said, Conservative Sen. David Tkachuk made him do it.

Tkachuk was and is a member of the Senate’s powerful internal economy committee and was, according to Duffy, the party guru for Conservative senators, particularly new ones like him, and in January 2009, Duffy said, Tkachuk gave him the lowdown on how the place worked.

In the background of their conversation was a recent story in the Charlottetown Guardian, wherein a local professor, showing uncommon sense for a professor, suggested that perhaps Duffy, being an actual resident of Ontario, wasn’t qualified to be a senator from, you know, P. E. I.

Duffy told Tkachuk he was worried about the story, Tkachuk told him not to fret, then went on to dispense some advice.

“So he ( Tkachuk) says it’s very important that you claim all the claims and allowances, because if you don’t, if you create any light between you and any other senator who’s on travel status when they’re in Ottawa but most particularly any P. E. I. senator, the professor will come back and say, ‘ See, he is different, he’s not really from here.’

“So he said it is essential that you claim everything that you are entitled to. It’s all within the rules and you are expected to do that.”

“I said, ‘ Even when I don’t really believe in per diems, because you’ve got to eat somewhere?’ ” Duffy said

“He said you must claim the per diems and you must claim the housing allowance … you must do this.”

Thus, though that was Duffy’s familiar scrawl on the various forms and expense claims, the moving finger, as it were, belonged to Tkachuk.

( For the record, Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt has heard that there were other senators, both Tories and Liberals, who live in Ottawa and claimed or claim all the same things Duffy did, and that there were a precious few who live in Ottawa and do not.)

Twice, he was moved to pronounce upon the egregious unfairness of it all.

“It’s outrageous, isn’t it?” he asked his lawyer, Don Bayne, during one of their oleaginous exchanges. At another point, reminiscing about the time he “bought a BlackBerry at my own expense” — that would stand out in his memory — because the 2011 election campaign was underway and Tkachuk had warned his senators not to run up campaign costs on the public dime, Duffy was positively indignant.

“And that’s what I was doing, representing the Senate of Canada, at the funerals of VIPs, which are now being criticized,” he said. “It’s outrageous!”

On a third occasion, Duffy sniffed plaintively, “That again raises the question, why am I here?”

Where the day before Bayne elicited from his client a corn pone recitation of his deep roots and vast love for P. E. I. and a lengthy list of his medical problems, Wednesday the lawyer concentrated on showing that contrary to any suggestion Duffy had been living beyond his means and potentially had a motive “to nickel and dime” the Senate for bogus funds, Duffy and his wife were in fact the lucky recipients of about $ 162,000 of legacies from various dead relatives.

None of it was taxable, thus Duffy didn’t have to declare it, and the forensic accountant who testified and raised the possibility of unaccounted- for funds couldn’t have known about it, as indeed his report declared up front.

This was an important point to clear up, certainly, but involved much detail about the Duffys’ incomes, pensions and expenses — including about $ 100,000 in renovations they had done to the cottage on P. E. I.

That, in turn, involved a lengthy, nail- by- nail tour of the renovation, complete with pictures of the various tradesmen who worked on it, invoices for work and materials as varied as submersible pumps, drain socks, the jacks and pneumatic bags used to raise the cottage so a basement could be built, and exclamations about various marble bits and Berber carpet and Heather Duffy’s “wonderful garden.”

All the cheques paid to these tradesman were written on Duffy’s bank — one feels churlish pointing this out amid the frequent paeans to P. E. I., its clever workers, its stores and the magnificence of the views and the people — in Ottawa, where the senator actually lived.

Bayne pointed out that since Duffy had claimed about $ 80,000 in living expenses for that house, and spent almost $ 100,000 on fixing up the P. E. I. place, “At best you were breaking even? Or behind the 8- ball?”

Similarly, the pair agreed that Duffy, by claiming $ 30 a day for living in the Ottawa joint, was actually saving the taxpayers money, because senators who actually came from out of town on official business could claim up to $ 200 a night to stay at a hotel.

“It was substantially more expensive?” Bayne asked and Duffy replied, with a suffering sigh, “Yes.”

You see? It wasn’t wrong, it surely wasn’t criminal, Tkachuk made him do it anyway, and besides, he saved the public money.

With the thanks of a grateful nation, etc …