It’s difficult not to imagine that the Senate scandal is also something of a journalism scandal.
Christie Blatchford,
Don Bayne, in his dogged, two- day cross- examination of a Senate staffer, threw out the last questions with a casual contempt — not for the staffer, of course, but for the piddling amounts that are, in part, at issue here at the criminal trial of his client, the suspended Sen. Mike Duffy.
Bayne’s inference seemed pretty clear; for why else did he mention the tiny amounts? It was as if to say, all this kerfuffle over such chicken feed?
That Barbara Bush photograph, Bayne said, that the prosecutor had made much of, cost $ 34.30. Did the witness see that?
“Yes,” Sonia Makhlouf, a veteran human resources officer at the Senate, replied wearily.
And that 8- by- 10 enlargement of the photograph of Miranda and Colin, Bayne asked. ( He didn’t say they are Duffy’s daughter and grandson.) That was for $ 2, wasn’t it, Bayne asked, a sneer in his voice. And the extra 5- by- 7 enlargements, didn’t they cost $ 5.25? And the witness had no idea what that photograph was about, did she, the suggestion being that if she did, she would understand completely why it was fair for the taxpayer to foot the tiny bill.
And to all of this, Makhlouf agreed.
For the record, this is how much of the cross- examination went, with Makhlouf merely agreeing to Bayne’s suggestions. Like others in the courtroom, her will to live appeared to be leaking away at a great rate.
She is a diminutive, softspoken woman whose command of English is imperfect and who seems naturally deferential. If a polite albeit relentless lawyer can get her to agree to virtually his every suggestion, it’s not difficult to imagine that an entitled senator, any one of them, might run circles around her.
The point — that the various amounts in Duffy’s fraud, breachoftrust and bribery trial aren’t so huge — stands.
By my count from prosecutor Mark Holmes’ opening statement, there are: $ 82,000 in per diem claims Duffy made while living in his own Ottawa- area house; 13 disputed travel claims; about $ 64,000 in service contracts to his old friend, Gerald Donohue ( it was from this pool of money that the photographic bills were paid, which was perhaps “not administratively regular,” as Bayne said, but nonetheless allowable in the Senate’s freewheeling culture); and, of course, the $ 90,000 cheque from Nigel Wright that Duffy accepted to repay the $ 82,000 of Ottawa claims, which grew to $ 90,000 with interest.
But Bayne’s knife cuts both ways: Who bothers to bill the company for a $ 2 charge? Who even tries to keep track of all those little pieces of paper?
That, in turn, raises a different and more important question, one reader named Dan Kyba crystallized for me in an email on Wednesday.
Unless one is going to argue that Duffy ( and his under-investigation former broadcast sister and Senate colleague, Pam Wallin), in Kyba’s words, “became ethically challenged after they became senators,” and were until that point scrupulous journalists, it’s difficult not to imagine that the Senate scandal is also something of a journalism scandal.
After all, very few adults, in late middle age as Duffy was when he was appointed, suddenly and for the first time ever develop startling new ways of doing business and habits, though once in the soup, as it were, a good many make such a claim. So there’s that. But Kyba also points out that Duffy for years lobbied frantically to become a senator, a practice that was well- known and is wellremembered in this town.
As Jonathon Gatehouse wrote almost two years ago in Maclean’s, Duffy was even nicknamed “the Senator” after he arrived in Ottawa, and if it were a joke at first, Gatehouse wrote, “by the mid- 1980s, when he was the biggest name in Ottawa — vastly more popular than the politicians he covered — it wasn’t really a joke anymore. Mike knew everyone. And everyone knew he wanted a seat in the Red Chamber.”
Yet, as Kyba notes, he “continued to practice journalism among
Find me any professional — doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant even politician — who could practice with that kind of conflict of interest and not be disciplined.
those he was lobbying. Find me any professional — doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant even politician — who could practice with that kind of conflict of interest and not be disciplined.”
Duffy was a national political specialist first for the CBC, and from 1988 on for CTV, where he had first his own Sunday show and then a five- day- a- week panel show on CTV’s news network, a job he held until his Senate appointment.
It’s troubling that he was able both to continue his campaign for an appointment — Gatehouse quotes former Liberal chief of staff Eddie Goldenberg saying that former prime minister Jean Chretien “once told me that every time Mike saw him in the corridor he’d yell out, ‘ prime minister, I’m ready! I’m ready!” — while continuing to work as a political journalist in Ottawa.
The money isn’t the only thing here, in other words, and it’s not even just about the criminal charges: It’s about ethical conduct, not just for senators, but for journalists and their organizations, too.