Arguments: Not good day for PM, democracy,
Documents on the Senate scandal released by the RCMP on Wednesday are a biting indictment of the prime minister and the way our government is run.
Fundamentally, the Mounties allege that criminal acts were committed under the nose of the prime minister, with former chief of staff Nigel Wright suspected of “bribery, fraud and breach of trust” in the payment of the now infamous $90,000 to Mike Duffy. Duffy also faces similar allegations.
The documents show a PMO so concerned about the impact of the scandal that it directed a supposedly independent Senate committee to fix its findings on Duffy to suit partisan political considerations. This is not good news for Stephen Harper.
From the moment the scandal broke, the central question has always been what the prime minister knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it. The prime minister remained steadfast that he did not know about Wright’s decision to pay Duffy $90,000. It was all Wright’s doing, and the moment he, the prime minister, knew what his top adviser was up to, he fired him. The court documents shed new light on the events that — to be charitable — calls into question the veracity of what Harper has been saying.
Consider this chain of events: Responding to a query from the prime minister’s press secretary, who was seeking guidance in how to answer a reporter’s question, Wright writes: “The PM knows in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to repay the expenses.” But let’s not quibble about what “broad terms” might mean. While there is no evidence Harper knew of the details of that eventual $90,000 payment, there are hints he knew of the overall approach: pay Duffy’s expenses, to make the problem go away. In an email exchange on how to fix things to allow Duffy to pay the $32,000 he was believed at the time to owe in bogus expense claims, Wright wrote to Harper’s legal counsel Benjamin Perrin: “I think we should lay out the approach in a brief memo to the PM.” Did they? Wright writes later: “... will work with Ben (Perrin) to get something for the Prime Minister tonight.” This was Feb. 15.
So what approach did they lay out for the prime minister, to avoid “the Chinese water torture of new facts in the public domain that the PM does not want”? It seems from this exchange that Harper knew, or must have known that his underlings were working to pay Duffy $32,000, which is what they thought he owed at the time. Whether it was the party’s money or Wright’s matters much less than the fact of the PMO-orchestrated payment to a senator. Now fast-forward to Feb. 22. Wright writes to Perrin to speak with Duffy’s lawyer Janice Payne and complete discussions on what Duffy owes and has to be reimbursed, the communication strategy, her fees, and tie up all loose ends, noting: “I do want to speak to the PM before everything is considered final.” Less than an hour later, according to the court documents, Wright follows up with an email: “We are good to go from the PM once Ben (Perrin) has confirmation from Payne.”
This is not a good day for the prime minister and our democracy. Here we have high government officials conspiring to fix a Senate inquiry, and a chief of staff accused of fraud and bribery from his efforts to protect a prime minister who, it seems, might have known more than he has admitted. The steady drip of facts is indeed a torture — a torture the prime minister has the power to end, by telling Canadians the whole story. But that is not the prime minister’s style. We may have to wait for the courts to tell us what really happened — or a judicial inquiry. Whether anyone was guilty of a crime or not, the prime minister bears moral responsibility for leading an office that has tried to undermine the independence of the Senate and inappropriately influence the behaviour of parliamentarians.