HOMESPUN TRUTHS AT DUFFY TRIAL
Perhaps for the first time in Canadian history, a witness in a criminal case Thursday effectively invited his wife to join him in the witness box.
Clifford Dollar was testifying by telephone from his home in Springvale, P.E.I., at Mike Duffy’s fraud, breach of trust and bribery trial.
“I’ll just give you to the wife here,” the construction worker and all-around handyman told prosecutor Mark Holmes, who was asking him a few last questions in re-examination.
Holmes had been asking to what address in Ottawa Dollar sent invoices for work he did on Duffy’s P.E.I. cottage, and at first Dollar contented himself with repeating the question for his wife and then repeating what she told him.
But finally, though no one in the court could see it, Dollar just handed her the phone.
As the Ottawa courtroom erupted in laughter, Holmes tried to dissuade Dollar, but when a voice finally answered, it wasn’t Dollar but his missus, who cheerfully replied, “OK, I’ll put him back on.”
It was the high point, or one of them anyway, in Dollar’s evidence, which was itself the summit of a day of homespun wisdom as witnesses from small towns on both East and West Coasts testified.
Earlier, when Dollar’s examination-in-chief by Holmes ended, and Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, greeted the 71-year-old, Dollar seemed to recognize his smoothas-butter voice and, grateful to be among friends again, cried happily, “How ya doing? Was I any help to you?”
Along with everyone else in the room, Bayne grinned and told him he’d been of great help “to the court.”
Dollar told Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt off the top that he’s hard of hearing and was having trouble making out what people were saying.
For instance, when the court clerk asked if he’d like to affirm or swear a religious oath, Dollar asked, “What’s that again?” and when Holmes repeated it more loudly, he said, “I could go either way. I got a Bible here anyway.”
Dollar is one of a group of witnesses testifying about Duffy’s cottage in P.E.I. and whether, as an un-winterized, unheated bungalow that was usually snowed in most winters as it was for several years of Duffy’s Senate service, it could ever have reasonably quali- fied as his “primary residence.”
The 69-year-old former broadcaster, of course, claimed that it was, a declaration that allowed him to file for “additional” living expenses for living in his comfortable secondary residence in suburban Ottawa.
Another group was the “Saanich” witnesses, those with evidence to give about Duffy’s trip to Vancouver over the Labour Day weekend in 2009, when what is perhaps the country’s longest continuously running fair takes place in Saanich on Vancouver Island.
The fair is the biggest event of the fall apparently, and all political parties, provincial and federal, rent booths from which they flog their wares, one of whom that year was to be Duffy.
Duffy and his wife, Heather, flew to Vancouver Sept. 5-8 that year for what he declared was “Senate business.”
The trip cost taxpayers about $8,000.
Yet according to Duffy’s own diaries, now in evidence, the only business function on the four-day trip was his scheduled appearance Sept. 6 at the fair with then-local Conservative MP Gary Lunn.
Indeed, the diaries suggest that Duffy was busy with fam- ily events — a play his daughter, Miranda, who lives in Vancouver, was in, and several dinners out “with the kids.”
And Duffy never went to the fair — though why that was is in dispute.
Bruce Hallsor, a Victoria lawyer and longtime Conservative who was on the local riding association board, said he was part of an association decision “that resulted in him (Duffy) not coming.”
He said once the association learned “Senator Duffy needed to have his travel reimbursed, and it was a fair bit of money, so we politely declined in having him come. It was a collective decision.”
That was presumably in relation to the Vancouver-Victoria part of the trip; the Senate paid for the much longer, much more expensive business-class flights from and to Ottawa.
Bayne objected frequently that Hallsor’s evidence was hearsay and that Holmes was seeking to raise “innuendo” about Duffy, who, Bayne said, already has been “sufficiently vilified in the media.”
Note to Bayne: The media will decide what’s sufficient, sir.
Three witnesses from the socalled “funeral” group also testified, all from P.E.I.
As Duffy’s diaries attest, and to take a liberty with Matthew 18:20, wherever there were “two or three” gathered in God’s name at a visitation or funeral, there was Duffy among them.
Thus, prosecutors called Myrna Sanderson and Thane Arsenault, who attended two of the funerals and could vouch for Duffy’s presence, and Charlottetown funeral director Allison Swan, who praised Duffy’s splendid eulogy at the third.
The dead were respectively Second World War super codebreaker Cliff (the “spy from P.E.I.”) Stewart, beloved local basketball coach Robert LeClair and Isobel DeBlois, a woman from a prominent local family who was a close friend of Duffy’s mother.
Duffy billed for all three, citing “Senate business” or “visit region” as the ostensible reasons for the trips.
By day’s end, the corn pone had been laid on so thick (Bayne was the worst offender, forever labelling in his cross-examinations P.E.I. a “special” place and Duffy’s appearances as a vital part of Canadian democracy), a body felt as sickly full as though she had actually been to the freaking fair and the funerals and eaten too much sugar at both.