Tories answer only to police, it seems
Opposition MPs and citizens unable to demand accountability
On the surface, Ottawa seems dull and predictable, sheathed, these days, in snow and ice, full of dutiful public servants going about their duties, but in fact it is an exotic land of mystery, where things are rarely what they seem.
On the surface, it looks like Pleasantville, except that everybody knows Treasury Board rules and has an excellent pension, but look a little deeper and it feels like Twin Peaks, or the Twilight Zone: mysterious and seamy.
Consider, if you will, that Sen. Carolyn Stewart Olsen, long one of Stephen Harper’s closest aides, gave an interview to RCMP officers in which she said several things that they suggest appear to be untrue.
Two Mounties interviewed Stewart Olsen back on June 21, a day after they released court documents outlining their investigation to that point. They were then looking into alleged breaches of trust by Conservative senators Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau and then-Liberal senator Mac Harb.
Olsen, therefore, may not have known that the Mounties were also investigating Nigel Wright’s $90,000 payment to Duffy, which the RCMP says was illegal and which Wright says was not. She may have had no idea that Wright would give the police two binders of emails, and that they would ultimately review 250,000 emails from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Whatever she thought, what she told them was that she and other Tory senators handled an audit into senators’ expenses without input from the PMO. She told the Mounties that she only recalled “communicating with Nigel Wright on one occasion, at a meeting at the end of April 2013, to provide an update on the audit process.”
The RCMP’s email record, though, shows that she was often exchanging emails with Wright and other officials in the PMO, that she was implementing their instructions.
She told the police: “No one gave her direction or orders to change the Senate Report.”
On March 1, though, the RCMP says, she sent Wright an email pledging fealty and complaining at being out of the loop: “Hi Nigel, just a quick note to say that I am always ready to do exactly what is asked but it would have been a great help to know in advance what the strategy was.”
Consider that from 2002 until 2009, when Harper put her in the Senate, Stewart Olsen was engaged by him as press secretary and communications director. Anonymous staffers whispered to reporters that she always had his ear, claiming that she brought out the worst in him, and she survived when other servants came and went, fiercely personally loyal to the boss.
If the version of events that Stewart Olsen gave the police was “incomplete, and not consistent with the facts,” as they wrote, what was she telling reporters all those years?
Since the RCMP documents were released Wednesday, the prime minister has said nothing about this. When NDP leader Tom Mulcair asked about Stewart Olsen in question period, Harper replied by pointing at Duffy and Wright, and neither he nor anyone in his government has made a statement about her failure to be forthcoming with the police. So far as we know, they approve.
And consider that Sen. Irving Gerstein, the chief bagman for the Conservative party, called Michael Runia, a managing partner of Deloitte Canada, which benefits from millions of dollars in contracts from both the party and the government, to discuss the Duffy audit, according to police.
On March 21, after talking to Gerstein, PMO staffer Patrick Rogers wrote to Wright: “Any repayments will not change Deloitte’s conclusions because they were asked to opine on residency. However, they can’t reach a conclusion on residency because lawyer has not provided them anything.”
Wright asked Gerstein to call Runia because Duffy was refusing to agree to pay back his disputed expenses (with Wright’s $90,000) depending on the conclusion of the audit, according to the RCMP.
At committee this week, Deloitte’s lead auditor on the file, Gary Timm, a certified fraud examiner with 22 years of experience, testified that Runia called him to ask what would happen if Duffy paid the money back. Timm, who deserves the benefit of the doubt after a career of tracking down cheats, says he didn’t give any information to Runia and ended the call quickly.
But the email chain released by police makes it clear that the PMO somehow learned that Deloitte would not reach a conclusion on Duffy’s residence, and that the audit mysteriously failed to reach a conclusion.
The Liberals on the committee tried to move a motion to have Runia come to testify about this mystery. The Conservatives voted that down. It is depressing to think that only the police are able to demand accountability from this government, and that the prime minister’s servants can’t be trusted to tell the police the truth.