Wright could shed light on payment
Former Harper chief of staff expected to testify at trial this week
Nigel Wright has been a star of Canada’s corporate and political worlds. He will be remembered for his turn as a star witness.
That is what he’ll be on Wednesday, as suspended senator Mike Duffy’s criminal trial resumes. Wright, the millionaire privateequity player who has been the right hand of a corporate giant and a prime minister, is to testify about the infamous $90,000 payment to the broadcaster-turned politician that the Crown alleges was a bribe, a breach of the public trust, a fraud on the government — and part of an attempt to make a spreading scandal infecting Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government go away.
The three charges are the last of the 31 Duffy faces. The first 28, explored in detail in 36 days in court in the spring, have to do with how Duffy claimed expenses for his Kanata home as a secondary residence, for his travel, and for work and supplies the Senate likely wouldn’t have paid for. But the $90,000, the amount of the living expenses, is what took the scandal into the Prime Minister’s Office. Wright’s payment to the senator made Duffy’s dealings a peril not just to Duffy and his Conservative party, but to Harper’s hold on power. And Harper is in now in the thick of a very long election campaign.
For the trial, the central question is whose idea it was for Wright to give Duffy that bank draft. Beyond the court case, the question is what Harper knew and when.
Emails released in the course of the RCMP’s investigation of Duffy’s business — with which Wright co-operated — offer hints, but only hints: A note he wrote to underlings about the payment saying that “we are good to go from the PM” suggests Harper knew a lot.
Later, Wright told a press secretary being asked questions by reporters that the boss knew only in general terms that Wright had helped Duffy find the money.
His testimony should clear that up, and cast a lot of light on how Harper’s staff coped with the deepest political crisis of his prime ministership, including whether the accounts he gave in public match up with what was happening in private.
Reading the documents the Mounties filed in court to get their search warrants and production orders in the Duffy case, an image comes across of Wright increasingly aghast at the mess he had to contend with in early 2013.
“I think this is going to end badly,” he told senior people in the PMO in February that year, just as the Duffy affair was beginning to consume him.
It sure did: The mess cost Wright his job at Harper’s side, which he’d held for about three years. Whether Harper accepted his resignation sadly or fired him in a rage over his bad judgment is unclear, since the prime minister has told the story both ways and Wright has kept his silence on it. Along the way, Wright struggled to manage Duffy (who’d lawyered up), senior Tory senators David Tkachuk and Marjory LeBreton (who were sick to death of their relatively new colleague), a drip-drip-drip of damaging news stories on television and in the papers, and the whole rest of the business of the Government of Canada.
Wright had been a conservative activist his whole adult life, with his first stint in professional politics in Brian Mulroney’s PMO as a young speech writer, and vaulted up the ladders in both politics and the private sector. After leaving Harper’s service in May 2013, Wright returned to his job at Onex Corp., the privateequity firm Harper had borrowed him from. Onex buys up troubled companies and either revitalizes them or strips them, placing people like Wright on their boards to guide the transformations. It’s in everything from movie theatres to car parts, though it’s probably best known for founder Gerry Schwartz’s failed attempt to merge Air Canada and Canadian Airlines in the late 1990s.
Wright’s self-discipline, as demonstrated by his daily running routine, is legendary: when he lived in Ottawa, he’d set out every morning before work on a half-marathon from his condo at 700 Sussex Dr. next to the Château Laurier. It was such a reliable habit that CTV’s Danielle Hamamdjian once ambushed him as he loped by the Mac’s on Laurier Avenue in Sandy Hill, at 4 a.m., to ask him about Duffy. He didn’t say much, except that he’d made some mistakes and was cooperating with the authorities.
Succeeding in private equity, as Wright has, takes management talent, steel nerves, and a willingness to do hard things — to make deals worth billions with other people’s money, to combine and break up companies other people built, to cut other people’s jobs. In Wright, those qualities are combined with a moral code derived from his devotion to a traditionalist strain of Anglicanism. It’s a throwback to the faith’s Catholic roots followed in just a few Canadian churches (St. Barnabas in Centretown is the one in Ottawa), featuring ornate services and a social conservatism that’s in deepening tension with the Anglican Communion’s increasingly liberal positions on things such as homosexuality and the ordination of women.
Wright’s a graduate of Trinity College at the University of Toronto — known for its training of Anglican priests and its adherence to some of British academe’s more amusingly stuffy traditions — and has been a lay leader at his Toronto church. He raises money for charity, particularly Camp Oochigeas (for kids with cancer, where he’s also volunteered during his vacations), and serves at soup kitchens.
Wright has a hard edge, but he also lives his version of a Christlike life. He lives in London now, away from Canadian scrutiny, helping to expand Onex’s newish European business, but he’s flying in to testify in person. When he takes the stand and swears on that Bible, it’ll mean something.
Scant evidence on the bribery charges has been presented in court so far. The defence, particularly, has presented its case only in lawyer Donald Bayne’s opening statement and in his crossexaminations of the Crown’s witnesses. But the shape of each side’s argument has come out in the investigators’ court filings, in Duffy’s two grandiloquent speeches in his own defence in the Senate, and in the nipping the lawyers have done around the edges of those charges so far.
In the Crown’s take, Wright was Duffy’s victim. He’s a powerful and sophisticated man with a lot of money, but also a guy who’s out $90,000 of his own cash because Duffy demanded it.
In the defence’s take, Wright masterminded a scheme to turn Duffy into a scapegoat after a nudge-nudge-wink-wink arrangement to make him a Conservative party celebrity went bad. Duffy had been the one worried about his legitimacy as a Prince Edward Island senator, the one uncertain about some of his expenses, until senior party figures reassured him everything was on the up and up — and Duffy was the one to suffer when he became a political problem.
Bayne has promised he has a hoard of emails and other documents showing it, almost none of which has been seen publicly yet. In one, a nugget dropped by the by in some documents the canny lawyer filed about a separate dispute over a bit of evidence, Wright admitted he thought the living expense-claims that made up the $90,000 were legitimate, or at least defensible, and that leaning on Duffy to repay them was a brutal bit of politics.
In this telling, Wright’s $90,000 bank draft was booby-trapped: the point was to give Duffy the money he needed to write a cheque to the government with his own name on it, akin to a confession that he’d done wrong and was trying to make it right. The whole thing, Bayne said on the trial’s first day, was “a fiction, a fraud, a lie conceived for political damage-control purposes.”
The forensic-accounting expert Mark Grenon, who helped the Mounties disentangle Duffy’s finances and testified just before the trial’s summer break, poohpoohed that idea. If Wright set Duffy up, he did it ineptly, with no obfuscation about the source of the money. “It’s only one level in between. You would have multiple layers set, or pay somebody else and have them pay (Duffy),” Grenon testified. Wright even put “Senate expenses” right on the paper.
In the documents the RCMP has made public, the idea of the payment crops up in an email from Duffy’s then-lawyer Janice Payne, setting out who would do and say what about an affair that at that point had not progressed beyond an internal Senate investigation.
But much happened in this dirty business that was never written down. Wright was there. He’s expected to face questions for at least a week. All of political Canada will be watching.
Wright’s payment to the senator made Duffy’s dealings a peril not just to Duffy and his Conservative party, but to Harper’s hold on power.