Sen. Mike Duffy’s fickle friends flee

OTTAWA — In 2004, when I arrived in Ottawa to cover politics for the Halifax Chronicle Herald, I was lucky to get a desk in the press gallery between Maurice Godin, a canny Radio-Canada veteran, and Mike Duffy, who was then the host of CTV’s political show.

Both Godin and Duffy were kind to the East Coast greenhorn, and since Godin was on the Hill in the morning and Duffy in the afternoon, I was often able to get help with a story from two of the best reporters on the Hill without leaving my desk.

I got to be friends with Duffy, a twinkly-eyed storyteller with a love for gossip and cold white wine.

He was kind enough to have me on his show a few times, including the night of Oct. 9, 2008, when CTV decided to air some outtakes from an interview in which Liberal leader Stéphane Dion struggled to answer a confusing question.

I thought CTV was right to air the clip, since Dion wanted to be prime minister, but I thought Duffy’s take on the interview was way over the top. He treated it like the biggest gaffe since Robert Stanfield fumbled a football, and I’m embarrassed to say I squirmed through the panel discussion without saying that.

Duffy was in the tank for the Tories because he wanted Harper to appoint him to the Senate.

Call me soft, but after the election I hoped he was going to get the call, because I thought it would be good for both journalism and politics.

Duffy had compromised his journalistic independence during the 2008 campaign, but I thought he would make a great senator, and I was afraid that if he kept up the high-pressure TV gig, his ticker might give out and one day he’d collapse in the foyer of the House.

Soon after the campaign, he excitedly told me he got a Senate vetting call. He was due to speak with the prime minister. I told him he should ask Harper to appoint him as an independent.

After the call, Duffy told me Harper told him he needed him as a Conservative. Duffy agreed, and seemed thoroughly delighted to finally make it into the chamber of taskless thanks.

Duffy embraced his new role with unbecoming partisan fervour. After only a few months in the Senate, he spouted a crude joke about then Newfoundland premier Danny Williams getting into bed with Prince Edward Island Premier Robert Ghiz. The next year he attacked Ghiz by saying he was not as smart as his father, another low blow.

Duffy also insulted his former colleagues, in 2010 telling Nova Scotia Tories that today’s journalists are guilty of too much “critical thinking.”

This year, when he ducked through a Halifax hotel kitchen to avoid reporters waiting to ask him about his expenses, he said: “You should be doing adult work.”

This arrogance encouraged further media inquiry. Ghiz helped journalists establish some details about Duffy’s primary residence, in Ottawa, not P.E.I. as Duffy claimed, allowing him to pocket $90,000 in extra expenses.

All that time, Duffy was on Stephen Harper’s team, a team that does not mind if members crudely attack outsiders, so long as they don’t displease the boss. Duffy was a key player, packing halls around the country, raising buckets of money for the party.

But Duff had a multilayered accounting problem. On the first level, there is the fact that he was not a resident of P.E.I. when Harper appointed him, as is constitutionally required.

On the next level, there is the fact that his primary residence was in Ottawa, not Cavendish, P.E.I. He signed a form asserting otherwise, so he could pick up $20,000 a year to cover his Ottawa expenses. The third, and worst, level is that he filed a lot of claims for expenses to which he would not have been entitled, even if he had been a P.E.I. resident.

From April 2011 until March 2012, Duffy filed expense claims for 49 days for Ottawa expenses when he was in places other than Ottawa.

In spite of this, the Tories in the Senate refused to refer the question to the police. Instead, Nigel Wright, then the prime minister’s chief of staff, wrote a secret cheque for $90,000 so that Duffy could pay what he owed taxpayers, and the Tories in the Senate whitewashed a report on his misdeeds.

That was all fine with the powers that be, until Duffy, the old gossip, somehow spilled the beans on himself and inadvertently exposed the PMO coverup. Now that the story is out, Duffy’s old political friends are falling over themselves to attack the old Duffster, and this week the Tory senators finally agreed to call in the Mounties.

The facts have not changed much since earlier this month, when government House leader Peter Van Loan praised Duffy’s leadership.

The message is chilling: Stay in the good books with the boss, and things will go your way. Cause him headaches, and you won’t have a friend in the world.