Did Duffy ever pay for anything himself?
Perks covered by public funds include series of personal photos
OTTAWA — Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt has to answer the tough legal questions here at the trial of Mike Duffy: Did the suspended P.E.I. senator commit fraud, breach of trust and bribery? Is he innocent or guilty? Do the looseygoosey rules, accounting practices and administrative deference that was in the air at the Red Chamber get him off the hook or not?
But on Day 5 of the trial, a broader question out of the judge’s purview is arising, document by document, question by question, and it’s this: Did Duffy ever pay for anything — just one thing — out of his own pocket?
Monday, as the trial slowed to the stifling bureaucratic speed that is the norm in this city, prosecutor Jason Neubauer took a Senate human resources officer, Sonia Makhlouf, through some of the service contracts Duffy had signed out of his then-$150,000 “research and office” budget.
Chief among these were 12 cheques totalling about $64,000 over the four years 2008-12 to two companies run by Gerald Donohue, a Duffy friend who will testify this week.
In his opening statement last week, prosecutor Mark Holmes alleged this money acted as “a reserve pool of funds” that allowed Duffy to “opt out of financial oversight” and was “completely outside the established system.”
Among the cheques cut by Donohue’s companies, Maple Ridge Media Inc. and Ottawa ICF (Insulating Concrete Forms), were those for a makeup artist and, the judge heard Monday, framing for a whole series of photographs, mostly of Duffy with various others.
The total bill, which remarkably included an invoice for $2, was about $1,500 — for enlargements or framing of photographs, as Donohue described them, of “Mike and lady” or “Mike and Man,” “Lady, Man and Child,” “Mike and Wife,” “Mike with Women and Soldier,” etc., etc.
Presumably at Duffy’s behest, Donohue, who allegedly told the RCMP he wrote no speeches for Duffy despite what his contracts said, also had pictures of Barbara Bush and others mounted, and numerous enlargements made of a photograph of Duffy’s daughter and grandson.
As the witness Makhlouf said, when Neubauer asked her if she would approve payment for such pictures, “No. This is not the type of service, in general, that we approve.”
Asked particularly about the “lady, man and child” photograph, she seemed flabbergasted: “To be honest, I never received a request of this nature, to the best of my memory.”
Meantime, Duffy’s staff was diligently tracking down occasional receipts that had — oh, the horror — somehow been billed to the senator himself.
One hotel bill for a staffer, for instance, had mistakenly, an assistant wrote, been put “under the senator’s personal (this was underlined) credit card.”
Duffy’s executive assistant, Melanie Vos, wrote the finance section on April 24, 2009, about “two taxi charges for which I don’t have receipts” on Duffy’s American Express bill.
One, she explained, “is related to a taxi ride to Kanata (where Duffy lives) from the Senate after the senator attended a function held by the Speaker of the Senate. … The Senator left his vehicle on the Hill and felt it was best to take a taxi home as he had drank a few glasses of wine.
“Better safe than sorry,” she wrote.
Still, perhaps the most outlandish dinging of the taxpayers was for a $1,000 annual subscription to a prestigious online research product called Atlantic Matters that it appears Duffy never looked at or even opened.
Produced by MQO Research, Atlantic Matters surveys 1,400 Atlantic Canadians — including 200 Prince Edward Islanders — every month and brags it offers a window into the “most up-to-date thinking” of Maritimers.
For a senator who was born in P.E.I. but spent the majority of his adult life in Ottawa, where he’d worked for decades as a broadcaster, it would have been a useful way to keep on top of the issues consuming those he purportedly represented.
Yet as MQO vice-president Elizabeth Brouse wrote the RCMP, “I was able to track users to the service and do recall that Senator Duffy never logged onto the site.”
Duffy, according to that memo, had agreed to join a group of senators headed by Percy Mockler of New Brunswick in subscribing to the service.
The senators, Brouse told the police, agreed to split the cost.
She said she spoke to Duffy shortly after the invoice went out in February 2012.
When it hadn’t been paid five months later, she “tactfully reminded” him of their earlier contact and said “he will pay his share.”
The bill for $1,054.66 was paid Aug. 10 through Ottawa ICF.
It was perfect, really: Mike Duffy had a concrete forms company, which purported to provide him with “editorial services and writing services,” use public money to pay for a probably useful research product he never bothered to open.