The flaw in Duffy’s defence
Testimony peppered with gossip, slurs
The problem with Mike Duffy as piteous victim, which is decidedly where he and defence lawyer Don Bayne are going now that they’re finally getting to the Nigel Wright $90,000, is that in the nest of vipers that is apparently Parliament Hill, Duffy is so nakedly a serpent himself.
Virtually every one of his five days of testimony here at his criminal trial has been the same — blustery protestations of his own pure motives and actions, righteous denials of all misconduct, a genuinely remarkable lack of self-awareness, all of it peppered with a bit of salacious gossip here, a gratuitous slur or two there and poignant reminders that he’s a man in frail health.
Consider Monday, as the 69-year-old Prince Edward Island senator was being taken by Bayne, with the usual excruciating precision, through a variety of bills the public paid on Duffy’s behalf.
( All these bills were paid through companies affiliated with Duffy’s moneyman, Gerry Donohue, to whom he directed a good chunk of his $150,000-a-year research and office budget.)
In any case, he and Bayne were discussing a May 10, 2010 bill for makeup artist Jackie Lambert, who had made up him and then- prime minister Stephen Harper for some hideous dog- and- pony show they did to punish students attending a G8 youth summit.
Duffy had arrived at the Hill, found various youth milling about and TV cameras, but no makeup artist, he said. Turns out the PMO had forgotten about it. Harper’s regular makeup artist, Michelle Muntean, was in Toronto and the event was but an hour away.
Duffy suggested he call Lambert, the CTV regular artist, and in she came: Again the Old Duff saved the day.
But as part of his narrative, Duffy managed to mention Muntean’s claim to fame: “She’s responsible for inventing Peter Mansbridge’s hair … when there are just a few strands, she puts mascara on them and creates a hairline on TV,” he said.
“She invented that for Peter.” You see? Two drive-by points scored there: A shot at PM Harper, for having a makeup artist, and just for the hell of it, one at Mansbridge.
The precarious- health reminder this time came in Duffy’s explanation for why he’d earlier hired Lambert for his formal Senate portrait, a bill that was cruelly rejected by Senate finance because, he was told, the Senate doesn’t do makeup: Duffy was then waiting for surgery to remove “precancerous lesions” on his scalp, and when the Senate insisted he get the portrait done, he got Lambert to cover them up.
As for the lack of self-awareness, the example this day was Duffy’s description of the work fitness trainer-cum-consultant Mike Croskery allegedly did for him for three years for $3,000 a year.
Croskery testified here before Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt many months ago. He and many others in the courtroom Monday had heard Croskery acknowledge that he did not a whit of research on the “Age Wave” ( the impact of aging Baby Boomers) that Duffy now claims so obsessed him, that he produced no notes and no reports and that they just basically would have a yak as Duffy went through his paces.
Croskery never even mentioned the old Royal Canadian Air Force 5BX plan that Duffy claims was Donohue’s idea and the genesis for him and Croskery to devise an exercise plan like it for seniors that would keep them healthy longer and thus delay the impact of the Age Wave. Or something. As my clever Ottawa Citizen colleague David Reevely noted wryly, “Duffy was in the room” when Croskery was in the witness box, yet he testified as though Croskery had never been there, let alone testified to the contrary, and as if the judge and the rest of us had just been born.
As ever with Duffy, he pronounced his own every feeble thought brilliant and original, and so broached it one day to Ray Novak, one of Harper’s closest aides.
According to him, this is how their conversation went.
Novak: “Is this some kind of fitness deal?” Duffy: “Yeah.” Novak: “Mike, we’re a Conservative government. If you can find it in the Yellow Pages, we don’t do it.”
Much of the day was spent in Duffy’s vigorous defence of the various framed photographs of himself, his wife and even their dead dog Ceilidh (a picture of Ceilidh, alive on Cavendish Beach, Duffy used on special Senate notes as less formal, “softer” notes of condolence to those who had lost a loved one), plaques, mounted newspaper clippings and the like that he sent out, all paid at public expense.
A couple of personal photos had slipped in, by accident, into the publicly paid bills, but by and large this “memorabilia,” which the Senate routinely pays for, went to the legion of ordinary Canadians who were purportedly begging for pictures of Duffy, and even Mrs. Duffy, or to other Parliamentarians, the PM, even the Governor General.
Virtually, every time a Senator died, retired or farted, Duffy would find the most flattering stories written about him or her, and have them mounted and sent to the senator or his widow, often with a picture of him and said other senator.
“If you’ve got a den,” as Duffy said serenely, “it’s nice to have on a wall.”
In the immortal words of the current PM, Justin Trudeau, it’s 2015: Who has such a den? Who has plaques of themselves on the wall with senators? And why are Canadians footing the bill for an institution that deems such masturbatory greasiness a legitimate Parliamentary function?