By no means alone at Senate trough
Former EA’s testimony highlights weakness in checks and balances
Melanie Mercer is a nice young woman, with it appears some affection and regard for Mike Duffy, the suspended P.E.I. senator for whom she worked for three years-plus as his executive assistant.
It’s precisely for that reason — that she bears Duffy no grudge — that the impact of her testimony in examination-in-chief at his fraud trial here Monday is so devastating.
The general paucity and weakness of the supposed checks and balances over senators’ expense claims, and one particularly egregious fiction that was Duffy’s, was revealed by her innocuous evidence.
Mercer never knew, for instance, that Gerald Donohue — to whose family companies Duffy directed much of his yearly office budget, which Donohue then dispensed to all and sundry, from Duffy’s makeup artist to personal fitness trainer-cum-big thinker to various Duffy cronies and even a cousin or two — didn’t provide the “editorial services” and “writing services, including speeches” stipulated in his contracts with the Senate.
Mercer would forward these contract proposals, with their fictional portrait of Donohue-as-Duffy’s-creative-artist-in-residence; the Senate would approve and pay Donohue; Donohue would dish out the money as directed by Duffy to others.
Thus did any hint of financial oversight vanish into the air.
The Donohue contracts specified that he would write speeches and the like for the now 69-year-old Duffy. Duffy signed off on the contracts. Therefore, so far as Mercer knew, “Mr. Donohue was, to my knowledge, performing the work.”
In a pig’s ear, he was, but Mercer had no way of knowing that; she just prepared the appropriate paperwork appropriately, which is what Senate scrutiny is really all about.
Donohue, who is ailing, is expected to testify at trial, but it’s unclear when his health will allow it.
And why yes, Mercer told prosecutor Mark Holmes, Duffy did indeed sign stacks of blank travel expense claims in advance, in one fell swoop as it were.
As a brilliant colleague remarked, without missing a beat, this amounts to “pre-lying,” and must indeed be most convenient.
The proper process, of course, was as it is in much of the rest of the free world — the person making the claim would provide receipts, the EA would fill out the forms, the claimant would review the forms when completed and then he would sign and certify that they were accurate.
But, Mercer said, a couple of other senators’ EAs (she knew only their first names) had told her early on that was the way they did it in their office, and “they suggested to have the senator sign a stack of blank expense forms. That’s what they did.”
Mercer thought, she said, that “it would be practical and efficient,” particularly in Duffy’s case, she said, because it was very clear shortly after his appointment in January of 2009 that he was going to be on the road a lot.
“The demand was already coming in and we hadn’t even fully set up our office yet,” Mercer said. “He was very busy, very high in demand, so when these ladies (the other EAs) suggested having these pre-signed forms at the ready, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
(That Duffy, a former veteran broadcaster, was immensely popular in Conservative circles is not at issue at the trial. What that says about the state of that party, or more broadly about Canadian politics, is quite horrifying.)
As Mercer put it once, “I think he (Duffy) trusted my work and I trusted the information he was giving me and we went forward from there.”
She said this with a perfectly straight face, even as the prosecutor, going through the disputed travel claims, demonstrated that on virtually all of the forms Mercer filled out, there were mistakes or inaccuracies, and even as other evidence at trial has made it clear that Duffy was hardly a reliable source of information in this regard.
As it turns out, Mercer said, most of the travel claims Duffy submitted likely had been signed in advance, as blanks.
And while she may have pronounced the practice reasonable and workable — the pre-signed forms allowed the cash flow from Senate coffers to keep coming as Duffy and wife flounced about the country — she didn’t tell her finance clerk about it. “I kept it between us at the office,” she said, “Between Senator Duffy and I.”
The prosecutor spent some time going over a couple of especially problematic travel claims.
There was the one that saw Duffy paid $10,000 to give a speech even as he billed the Senate for his and wife Heather’s business-class flights from P.E.I., and another claim, in midsummer 2012, which was rejected by finance because the trip appeared to be built around Heather Duffy’s doctor’s appointment in Ottawa — but which was then miraculously saved when Mercer suddenly remembered a “community event” in Ottawa.
But there was a sort of cumulative truth, too, and it’s the same one that has been told at the trial since it began.
It is also the same truth that has been spinning out daily as the contents of the auditor general’s searing report on the Senate, which will be released Tuesday, have leaked out.
It is this: Mike Duffy was not a lone wolf, gone rogue at the trough. The Senate trough was almost purposebuilt, designed to fail the taxpayer, and it’s going to take a monumental effort to dislodge all those snouts.
I think he (Duffy) trusted my work and I trusted the information he was giving me