‘WHEN I’M BACK IN THE SENATE’: LATEST PRONOUNCEMENT BY MIKE DUFFY A STUNNER, AFTER EMBATTLED SENATOR SPENDS WEEK IN WITNESS BOX PORTRAYING HIMSELF AS OPEN, HONEST VOICE OF REASON.
MNOW, THERE ARE PROMISES, AND THEN THERE ARE PROMISES THAT STILL THE BLOOD. — COLUMNIST CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
ike Duffy’s testimony in his own defence, battering in its length and detail, now borders on cruel and unusual punishment.
In four days this week in the witness box at Ontario Court, the 69-year-old has purported to deliver lectures on subjects as varied as Prince Edward Island history, the problems of Charlottetown Harbour and the joys of Industrial Research Benefits or IRBs (don’t ask); shamelessly name-dropped and described virtually everyone he hired, and practically every one he met or whose funeral he attended as “distinguished;” called the 31 criminal charges he is facing as mostly “failures of communication” (not his own); and rattled on that in everything he did, he was open, completely transparent and honest.
But Friday, his pink face beaming, he spoke with supreme confidence about his future.
It was as he was wrapping up the instructional on IRBs (still don’t ask) that he said, of the plan he once pushed, “I still think it’s an innovative and valid idea.”
“So when I’m back in the Senate, I’ll be sending that along to the current minister of industry.”
Now, there are promises, and then there are promises that still the blood.
The diminished crowd in Judge Charles Vaillancourt’s court is accustomed to the former, the frequent muttered pledges of Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, whose murmurs of “Oh, we’ll get to that, sir” and “We’ll go through that in detail, Senator, but not yet” and “You’ll have lots of time to talk about that Mr. Duffy,” are quite bad enough.
But the latter was new and ominous. This was the accused himself, sure as can be that if this sucker ever ends, he will, in the language of alleged perpetrators everywhere, walk.
Bayne is taking Duffy through every one of the criminal counts against him at painstaking length. Each section is accompanied by a careful examination of the governing Senate administrative rules and policies.
There are binders and boxes galore of these, which probably run to thousands of pages, but they amount to the same thing: sweet boo all.
In almost whichever version, for the rules are being constantly updated in order to render them even more opaque, senators are free to do pretty much what they will, when they will.
Is it a valid defence to a criminal charge, any criminal charge, that the applicable administrative rules allowed the impugned conduct? Do administrative rules supersede the law? Is it fraud, for instance, to claim you are on “travel status” in the city where you’ve lived for four decades and claim a per diem for living in your own house, as Duffy merrily admits doing (albeit, he claims, at the point of Sen. David Tkachuk’s spear) if lots of the other kids in the Senate were doing it too?
That is Duffy’s defence thus far to the charges: that he didn’t have the mens rea, the guilty mind, to deceive the Senate and didn’t try to in any case; the alleged rules permitted, if not encouraged, everything he did; other senators were doing the same thing.
He has even attempted, with Bayne’s guidance, to cast himself as a careful guardian of the public purse.
Every senator, for instance, is entitled to make 64 return trips, business class, in Canada; it’s called the 64-point system. In the five years under scrutiny here, Duffy never used his full allotment (he came close in 2010, when he had but one and three-quarters points unused). Or, as Bayne put it, “You left many points on the table every year?”
In the same vein, Duffy said Friday that though every new senator gets a one-time $50,000 budget to set up his new office, he managed his for about $1,000, but using publicservice furniture that was in storage.
“We left that money on the table,” he told Bayne. “It could easily have been used for widescreen TVs and stereos.”
(Looking over my notes, it’s not precisely clear if Duffy said that, or Bayne; the lawyer actually gives much of the evidence, with Duffy often merely saying, “Absolutely” or “Never, ever,” depending on the nature of Bayne’s assertion.)
Similarly, he admitted that, yes, he pre-signed many expense claims — a clearly dubious practice, if apparently a popular one at the Senate — but it was only, he said, to help Senate administration be more efficient.
“It was to help Senate administration to get the work done on time,” he said, serenely.
As well as watchdog of taxpayers’ money, Duffy is also attempting to portray himself as a voice of reason in the right-wing sea that he says was the Stephen Harper government.
He was never a Conservative, he said Friday. “I was a journalist,” he sniffed. “I never belonged to any political party and I never gave money to any political party.”
He wasn’t a Conservative. He wanted to sit as an independent, he has already testified. And he wanted to be appointed as an Ontario senator. But then-PM Harper insisted he must sit as a Prince Edward Island senator and a Conservative.
So why did he take the appointment? Oh yes, as the punch line of an old joke has it: “We have already established what you are; we’re just haggling over the price.”