Guilty or not, Mike Duffy’s glory days are over
Even shorn of its political importance, Sen. Mike Duffy’s criminal trial is extraordinary.
A sitting senator, a former close ally of a prime minister, is entering the secondlast phase of his trial on 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery for behaving in a way he insists was completely normal in the Senate of Canada. After the closing legal arguments from the prosecutors and Duffy’s defence lawyer this week, all that remains is the verdict, which probably won’t come for months.
Full of breaks and delays, the case has gone on for nearly a year — though on one day last fall, it’s true, a lot of the political puffery whooshed out of it.
“Now it’s just a criminal trial,” Duffy’s lawyer Donald Bayne observed when court reconvened in late November after a long pause. In August, the benches had been packed with people eager to see members of Stephen Harper’s inner circle testify about Duffy and what they’d tried to do about the scandal that erupted in 2013 over his claiming his longtime home in Kanata as a residence secondary to his cottage in Prince Edward Island.
That November day, with the prosecutors finishing the dregs of their case a few weeks after the federal election, even the press seats were half- empty. They filled up again, certainly, particularly when Duffy himself took the stand a few weeks later. But Bayne was and is right. It’s a major criminal trial, but no longer anything more than that. The Tory government is done, and so is Duffy’s stint as a politician.
The results matter a lot to him personally, of course. He’s not a healthy man and could theoretically spend the rest of his life in prison if he’s convicted on even a few counts. If Judge Charles Vaillancourt acquits him entirely, he’ ll celebrate an immense vindication.
But Harper is beyond being hurt, whether it’s by Duffy’s vengeful testimony about the monstrous conspiracy against him that the former prime minister supposedly oversaw, or by the incarceration of one of his proudest appointments.
If Duffy does return to the Senate, he won’t return to the prominent place he once held. Only a few elements of what he did or didn’t do are in dispute — the housing and travel claims, the office budget spent via contracts for a friend, the $ 90,000 he accepted from Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright, it’s all there on paper. What’s in question is whether he was allowed to do it all. If Vaillancourt decides he was allowed to do it — well, “Distasteful but not criminal” gets you out of court a free man but is not what we hope for in our politicians.
According to Duffy’s own testimony, he was appointed to the Senate to give “thirdparty validation” to non-Conservatives that Harper wasn’t a monster. They didn’t want him for his wisdom. They wanted him to deploy his celebrity, earned in decades of broadcasting from Parliament Hill, on the Conservative party’s behalf. He knew that going in, even if he didn’t realize the full extent of the constant campaigning that would be expected of him, and he went in anyway.
If Duffy rises in the Senate in a few months, it’ ll be as the guy who admits he got there by selling himself out to a prime minister who’s been repudiated. Who cares what Duffy has to say about veterans or tourism or the flavourful P. E. I. potato? Stephen Harper didn’t care, and even he’s all but gone now.
Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau face trials over their Senate expense claims. Pam- ela Wallin’s case is in limbo, waiting for the Duffy verdict. RCMP investigators have been poring over the files of 30 more senators identified as problem spenders by the federal auditor general. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau evicted Liberal senators from his party caucus even before things got really bad. Now he’s partway through a reform of Senate appointments that’s sometimes been clumsy and whose outcome even he doesn’t seem sure about. Duffy started a snowball downhill that won’t end until it’s rolled up a whole wing of Parliament.
Duffy is to the Senate as an acquitted Jian Ghomeshi would be to pop culture. Both of them, in different ways, are reminders of sick environments they inhabited and perpetuated, whether they walk or not.
‘ THE POLITICAL PUFFERY WHOOSHED OUT OF IT.’