Senator Mike Duffy to have his day in court April 7
Court to probe senator’s inner secrets — and the government’s
OTTAWA Maybe none of this would have happened if Mike Duffy had known when to just shut up.
The newsman-turned-senator faces a criminal trial on 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery starting April 7, one that’s expected to take us inside the workings of the federal Conservative party, the Senate and the Prime Minister’s Office.
The trial is about how Duffy, who was appointed to the Senate in 2008, handled the Senate’s money, but along the way we’ll hear about how the senator handled himself, how his fellow senators dealt with him, and how the PMO contended with a scandal that would not stop.
It all started going to hell in late 2012, when the Ottawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor reported that Duffy had filed tens of thousands of dollars in questionable expense claims. Duffy wasn’t the only one, either. The Senate launched an investigation that produced revelations about Duffy’s behaviour, and also that of then-Conservative senators Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Liberal Mac Harb (who has since retired).
But Duffy was the Big Deal, arguably the most famous person in the Senate and a prize for the Tories. The party wanted very much to help him out. It failed. Within a year, Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had resigned, Duffy had left the Conservative caucus and then been suspended from the Senate, and the police were rummaging through everyone’s dirty laundry.
The shape of the Crown’s case is in documents filed in court by RCMP investigators.
They’re mainly sworn statements from officers asking for search warrants, explaining to judges what they’re looking for and exactly why, pulling together material from interviews, media reports and previous searches. There’s a lot in them but they aren’t complete.
Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, has promised that Duffy has more emails, more notes, more evidence, “the tip of a big evidentiary iceberg.”
What the Mounties do have led them and the Crown to lay charges so wide-ranging it’s hard to keep them all in your head at once. If they have a theme, it’s this: When Mike Duffy saw a dollar, he tried to get it.
Duffy’s career on TV paid a lot more than most jobs, but not enough to make a man with expensive tastes comfortable for life. When he quit his politics show to become a $135,000-per-year senator, he took a pay cut, maybe of as much as half.
So, goes the allegation, Duffy found ways to make it up. He claimed that the house he already owned in west-end Ottawa, a city he’d lived in for 38 years, was a secondary residence, a place he kept only because he needed somewhere to lay his head while doing Senate work here.
The Mounties say that was fraud and a breach of the public trust.
Besides that, the RCMP say Duffy filed claims for Senate work when he probably was not on the job, such as when he was on vacation in Florida, or travelling exclusively to stump for the Conservative party.
They say he hired an old friend as a consultant on contracts totalling $65,000 over four years who did negligible work and redirected some of the cash to expenses such as a personal trainer and makeup artist.
And, though it accounts for just three of the 31 charges, there’s the $90,000 Duffy took from the prime minister’s chief of staff, Wright, to pay back the expenses he’d claimed. A fraud and a breach of trust, the RCMP say — and a bribe.
Precisely who told Duffy what is evidence for the trial, but both Duffy and Bayne have said he was reassured plenty of times that claiming his Ottawa house as a secondary residence was OK.
The Senate commissioned a report on what he’d done from the consulting firm Deloitte, which concluded it’s literally impossible to say, based on the Senate’s rules, what makes one place a primary residence and another place a secondary residence other than the senator’s say-so.
The rules talked about things such as travel expenses, living expenses and meal allowances, about primary residences, secondary residences, “provincial residences,” and God knows what else, but they never clearly define these terms. Senators are just supposed to know what they mean and be honest.
The trial’s real revelations will come when the lawyers dissect the $90,172 payment the prime minister’s chief of staff made to Duffy. Whatever the legalities were, Wright knew it looked bad for the Conservatives’ most famous senator to claim expenses for living in his own Ottawa house.
If Duffy gave the money back, the situation would at least stop getting worse.
To read the email trails examined by the RCMP, with Wright’s active help, is to see a skilled political operator striving mightily to contain a mess.
By the time Wright got heavily involved, the Senate already had an investigation underway, led by three senators, and that Deloitte report was nearly finished.
The Duffy problem preoccupied them all for months. By the end, the emails trail suggests Wright had finessed a solution where Duffy wouldn’t have to admit wrongdoing, the senators wouldn’t have to say everything he’d done was A-OK, and Deloitte wouldn’t have to say much of anything except that the Senate’s rules were unclear. Mostly, they’d all just stay very quiet except to say that Duffy’s repayment was the end of it.
“We are not asking Senators to absolve him of anything,” Wright wrote. “They would refuse that, quite properly. We are asking them to treat the repayment as the final chapter of the expenses issue relating to his designation of the P.E.I. cottage as his primary residence to this point in time.”
They just had to get the money from somewhere, because Duffy didn’t have any.
Where the idea came from that Duffy would write a cheque but somebody had to compensate him first is one of the questions for the trial. It seems clear in the RCMP’s documents that the proposal came from Duffy’s side. As they worked out the details, his then-lawyer Janice Payne wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office with a list of conditions, including: “As his apparent ineligibility for the housing allowance stems from his time on the road on behalf of the party, there will be an arrangement to keep him whole on the repayment. His legal fees will also be reimbursed.”
They can tell themselves whatever they want, Wright wrote in an internal email, as long as the taxpayers get their money back. (“Without acknowledging the accuracy of the premise?” is how he started talking about it.) The party’s fundraising arm — where Wright had worked — was open to paying Duffy’s bill. Wright was talking to Irving Gerstein, another senator and the chairman of the Conservative Fund.
Gerstein entertained the prospect of paying Duffy’s bill until he found out just how much it would be. Everyone had been working with a figure of about $32,000 — the amount that could be ascertained from Duffy’s public expense reports that covered about two years of his time in the Senate.
For the first 18 months of Duffy’s Senate tenure, however, he hadn’t been forced to post quarterly expense reports. They discovered the figure was more than $90,000. Wrapped up in that figure were Duffy’s claims for meals, even though he had fixed them in his own kitchen.
We’re out, said Gerstein. The record made public so far doesn’t show exactly how that happened, but it’s likely he worried that although donors might swallow a $32,000 payment for a troublesome but very useful senator, ninety grand would do more damage to the party’s fundraising pitches than Duffy was worth.
By this point, Wright no longer thought he was dealing just with a self-important windbag who’d made some mistakes: the police describe him as “incensed” by Duffy’s grasping. But he was so close to seeing the end of this disaster, and he had the money. He paid up.
What did Wright tell the prime minister?
What happened to Wright after that isn’t clear. We know he left the Prime Minister’s Office in mid-May 2013, and he has been discreet about just how and why. At the time, Harper presented it as a resignation, one he’d accepted reluctantly. By October, Harper’s story became that he’d fired Wright, enraged by his poor judgment in covering the $90,000.
The prime minister knew some generalities of what was going on, if Wright’s emails are to be believed.
There’s the famous email Wright sent to his staff on Feb. 22, 2013, as the details of the deal with Duffy were being negotiated (at this point, they thought the Conservative party would be covering a $32,000 payment and were sorting out some final elements with Payne).
“I do want to speak to the PM before everything is considered final,” Wright wrote to several people, including the PMO’s legal adviser, lawyer Benjamin Perrin. Then, a short time later: “We are good to go from the PM once Ben has his confirmation from Payne.”
Much later, in May, things were going south and reporters were starting to ask specific questions about where the $90,000 had come from. A press secretary asked Wright what Harper had known about it.
“The PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to repay the expenses,” Wright told him.
Harper himself has said publicly that he knew nothing of Wright’s personal help for the senator.
“I said to Mr. Duffy right from the outset that Mr. Duffy should repay his own expenses,” the prime minister told reporters in November 2013. “I was told that that is what he agreed to do. I was told that is what he had done. When I learned that that was not the case, I took the appropriate action” by firing Wright.
So what exactly had Wright told his boss and exactly when? The RCMP don’t reveal what they think happened, if they have an idea. It might emerge in the trial.