Duffy and the trip for a baby’s birth
Speaking gig in B.C. fortuitously timed, trial hears
Back in the bad old days, when most gay men were firmly in the closet, a “beard” was the term used to describe a woman who might appear as a date at a gay man’s side at a public function.
But before that, it was slang for anyone who acted for someone else, in any sort of transaction, to conceal the person’s identity or intention.
So in that original sense were the disenchanted veteran Ronald Keenan and the threetime failed Conservative candidate Troy DeSouza beards for the suspended senator Mike Duffy, in that it’s alleged that they — and a great many others — inadvertently gave cover to Duffy’s free-spending, merry-travelling ways on the public dime.
Keenan and DeSouza testified by phone from British Columbia Tuesday at Duffy’s criminal trial, which is moving along at its usual glacial speed.
Their role as beards came, it is alleged, as Duffy and his wife, Heather, flew to the West Coast in December of 2010.
According to one set of Duffy documents, the disputed travel claims that are the basis for some of the 31 charges against him, that Dec. 9-12 trip was for “Senate business — speaking engagement and meetings,” another example of the P.E.I. senator’s ceaseless toiling on behalf of Canadians.
Yet according to another set of Duffy documents, his infamous diaries, the trip was all about daughter Miranda giving birth.
There was only one Senate event — a Conservative Christmas party-cum-charitable fundraiser organized by DeSouza, the local Tory candidate for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca who was campaigning well in advance of the 2011 election even being called — in the diaries, but four mentions of the momentous Miranda delivery and two notations of visits to see her and the baby in a Vancouver hospital.
DeSouza found out Duffy was coming to the Vancouver Island event only a few days before; he’d asked the party weeks earlier if it could rustle up a speaker, and was delighted when he was told at the last minute it would be Duffy.
Keenan, a 34-year air force veteran, was with other former servicemen outside the golf club that night, protesting the Conservative government’s treatment of veterans but hoping to talk to Duffy.
The little group never got the chance, but, according to Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, who routinely gives evidence in his cross-examinations and did so with Keenan, Duffy was doing “Senate business” inside the club, working the room and talking to other veterans.
Now senators, as Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt has heard repeatedly, have a broad discretion in determining what constitutes “Senate” or “public” business; the loosey-goosey definition in the Senate administrative rules even specifically allows for “partisan” activities except during formal campaign and nomination periods.
But at its highest, in the very kindest light, Duffy spent about $10,000 — mostly for the business-class flights for him and Heather, though they also billed per diems and taxis, of course, because, you know, they could — of public money to give a single speech at a single Conservative event on Vancouver Island. That total doesn’t appear to count the couple’s flights to and from Victoria, and given Duffy’s well-documented inability to find his wallet, it leaves open the question of who did.
There is little doubt that he was a popular speaker in Conservative circles; DeSouza was hardly the first witness to tout Duffy’s praises as the best draw, second only to Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself.
But being a star in a political party, perhaps least of all that one, is hardly akin to being an actual star. Yet Duffy seems to have had a grandiose vision of his power.
His old friend from their shared days at CTV, Bill Rodgers, also known as William Kittelberg, completed his testimony Tuesday.
He received a $2,000 cheque for chats he’d had about energy and other issues with Duffy, from the concrete-form company Duffy used to dispense a significant chunk of his office budget. Rodgers/Kittelberg never asked for money, and thought the third-party way of paying him was odd, but cashed the cheque nonetheless.
But more importantly, it appears from Duffy’s diaries (and kudos to Mychaylo Prystupa of the National Observer, who first pored through the redacted portions and dug all this up in April), Duffy was also trying to insert himself into the Northern Gateway pipeline issue, which was then heating up.
And it appears he was hoping to use Rodgers/Kittelberg.
Duffy had taken to calling various Enbridge Inc. senior executives, so often that the company felt the need to alert the Prime Minister’s Office that Duffy’s contacts were unsolicited and that he wasn’t representing Enbridge.
(Graham White, the Enbridge manager of business communications, confirmed Tuesday in an email that an Enbridge government relations staffer called a policy adviser at the PMO in February of 2012 to set the record straight.)
D’Arcy Levesque, vicepresident of enterprise communications for Enbridge, also declined to retain Rodgers/Kittelberg, whom Rodgers/Kittelberg acknowledged meeting at Duffy’s behest.
“We (Duffy and Rodgers/ Kittelberg) had been discussing the possibility of me consulting for Enbridge here in Ottawa,” he said.
Reading between the lines, it appears that someone, at Enbridge, if not the Senate or government, had twigged to the fact that Mike Duffy was meddling.
They gave cover to Duffy’s| free-spending ways