Maybe Duffy has a point
But his lawsuit is still a bitter pill to swallow
It is always like this with Mike Duffy, the beleaguered Senator from Prince Edward Island — he invariably paints himself as high-minded, but consistently acts low.
Thursday from Ottawa, the 71-year-old issued a statement about his just-filed lawsuit against the Senate and the federal attorney general (specifically, the RCMP) that included this gem: “If this action succeeds in bringing Charter protection to all who work on Parliament Hill, this will be my greatest contribution to public life.”
You see?
He’s seeking $7.8 million in damages but it’s not for the money or the vindication, no sir, but rather for the good of the people: What a noble little fellow.
In truth, if he were to win the suit and a declaration that the Senate breached his Charter rights by arbitrarily suspending him without pay for more than two years, and the RCMP by conducting a prosecution the statement of claim calls negligent and politicized, it would be his only actual contribution to public life, unless one counts partisan speeches replete with bad jokes, stumping about the country for the Stephen Harper Conservatives and posing for photographs with the easily pleased.
But as bitter a pill as it is, Duffy has a point and he may just have a case.
Everyone, even an appointee who clamped onto the public teat with the unbecoming glee that Duffy evinced, is entitled to be presumed innocent — and, lest we forget, innocent is what Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt pronounced him.
His tome of a judgment was not one of those acquittals that can be slurred as “technical.” Nor was it a close call.
Vaillancourt found Duffy a credible witness; he also seemed to genuinely like him, and he was certainly impressed by Duffy’s criminal lawyer, Don Bayne.
But most important, the judge found that Duffy not only had committed no criminal acts — he was charged with and, in April of 2016, acquitted of 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery — but also that he’d not broken any of the Senate’s tremendously elastic rules.
Those rules insisted, for constitutional reasons, that a senator had to declare that his primary residence was in the province he was appointed to represent.
Duffy was sufficiently concerned about the obvious inherent duplicity — how on Earth could he say he lived in P.E.I. when everyone knew he’d been a fixture in the Ottawa area for decades as a broadcaster? — but was reassured by various Conservatives and other senators.
So he did that.
He had to do it.
The rules also allowed Duffy to treat his Ottawa area house as a secondary residence — and thus claim additional living expenses.
So he did that too, to the tune of about $20,000 a year for almost four years. That, he didn’t have to do. No one made him claim these things. Other senators also did. Many didn’t.
There was no claim-living-expenses-or-else decree, as there was with the residence declaration, but the rules said it was A-OK, and that was enough for Duffy.
The rules allowed a senator to fly his spouse to and fro when he was travelling on Senate business, so he did.
And could he help it if “Senate business” and “parliamentary functions” occasionally coincided with significant events in the lives of his grown kids (the birth of a grandchild, a daughter’s appearance in a play) or Christmas? Could he help it if Senate business was so loosely defined that it’s difficult to see what activity could not be smartly bent to conform with the definition?
He could not. So he did those things too.
There were no rules; ergo, it was virtually impossible to break the rules.
After his ringing acquittal last year, the Senate arbitrarily clawed back $17,000 from Duffy’s salary to reimburse some of the expenses the judge had already deemed valid.
Then Duffy sought to have the Senate partially reimburse him for legal expenses; the Senate has a policy of such reimbursement, but the Conservativecontrolled board of internal economy rejected that, anyway.
Duffy’s civil lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, called that spiteful at a news conference Thursday; it sure looks that way.
Then Duffy asked for reimbursement of all he’d lost in the almost two years he’d not been paid — benefits, accrued pension — nor allowed on the Hill. He wrote that plea Dec. 12 of last year; the Senate has not deigned to reply.
Thus the lawsuit.
The criminal prosecution of Duffy, of course, followed the attempts of those in the then-Prime Minister’s Office to frog-march him, in the midst of the wider scandal consuming the Senate, towards a repayment deal Duffy never wanted: the famous secret deal that saw Harper’s Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright, pay the $90,000 out of his own pocket in order to make Mike Duffy the political problem — and, if Wright was lucky, even the senator — go away.
I always shared what I took to be Wright’s repugnance at Duffy’s naked determination to suck every last drop he could out of his appointment; he surely did that, if nothing else.
But he was a creature of that indulgent place, the very embodiment of its worst excesses.
Mike Duffy deserved due process and fairness and to be presumed innocent of criminal charges. And, except in the courts, he got none of it.
DUFFY SOUGHT TO HAVE THE SENATE REIMBURSE SOME LEGAL EXPENSES. IT WAS REJECTED.