The wasteland of Duffy’s life laid bare
His lawyer defends all the payments by saying it wasn’t, you know, criminal
Freshly deposited in the Senate in 2009, one of the first things Mike Duffy did was commission a speech explaining to the world why he was a Conservative. “Because they made me a senator” not having a suitable ring of nobility to it, or being a theme capable of expansion into the 30 or so minutes you need to occupy a crowd.
He did not, as most recent ex-journalists would have, sit down, think it through and work something up for himself. He was a broadcaster and a paid speaker. The diaries entered as exhibits in his trial note occasions when he wrote his own speeches after becoming a senator, both for Parliament and for groups that had invited him. He talked about politics for a living.
But for this key moment at the outset of his political life, his opportunity to lay out his political philosophy, Duffy found someone else to do the work.
This is all apart from the things for which he’s now on trial. Never mind the travel allowances and housing claims and office expenses, let alone the alleged bribery. This is about how Mike Duffy was a senator.
He did not pick just anyone to job that speech out to. He hired L. Ian MacDonald, who himself had been a Parliament Hill journalist before he started writing speeches for Brian Mulroney.
MacDonald is not the first or the last newsman to go into government service, but usually it’s a one-way ticket; MacDonald has wandered back and forth between government work and journalism since the 1980s, including writing commentary for the Citizen from time to time.
MacDonald charged Duffy $7,000 for a 2,100-word history of the Conservative Party of Canada from Sir John A. Macdonald to Stephen Harper ( just the good parts). It was, MacDonald the writer testified, a “core speech,” one Duffy could use on many occasions. Provided, I guess, he was speaking to Conservatives, who’d be the only people who might cheer an address that managed to give John Diefenbaker credit for public health care.
For this speech, titled Why I Am a Conservative, By Senator Michael Duffy, you and I got the bill. Well, Duffy’s friend Gerald Donohue got the bill and paid it, it appears, with money Duffy got from us. This actually seems to have been one of the more honest jobs Donohue covered, since his paperwork with the Senate had him hired for writing and editorial services. At least this was a speech, not makeup or photo prints.
Speaking of photos: Obviously politicians send out pictures of themselves with constituents and admirers. Fine. But the invoices from Duffy’s favourite photo shop in Kanata list things like blowups and mountings of images of Duffy’s fellow Tory senators Wilbert Keon (at whose Heart Institute Duffy is a patient and a devoted fundraiser) and Michael Meighen, both of whom retired in the last couple of years.
It’s not clear whether these were farewell gifts or mementoes for Duffy’s own walls. But either way.
And we paid for Duffy’s $500 tips to his intern, his cousin in P.E.I. who sent him news clippings, and his friend Mark Bourrie, who battled Internet trolls for him. None of them expected to be paid, but they all got warm personal gestures of thanks. From us.
Bourrie is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, whose rules forbid taking money from politicians.
Coming out of court and scrummed by reporters, he pointed out that they included a guy he’d previously shamed for misreporting the death of Gordon Lightfoot a few years ago and the boyfriend of a press-gallery executive he’d fought with over an attempt at a new policy on complaints about gallery members.
So it’s not that reporters are utterly unimpeachable. But traditionally, one makes something a disinterested outsider might recognize as an effort at maintaining an ethical standard.
Effort is what’s missing from Mike Duffy’s short senatorial career in general. Not that he wasn’t busy — he certainly was, especially on behalf of the prime minister and the Conservative party — but mostly he went around just being Mike Duffy and getting applauded and stroked for it.
In court, top Senate administrator Nicole Proulx read aloud a vicious little note she received about a foul-up her staff made with the tax paperwork for Donohue’s contracts, excoriating the Senate’s finance department for incompetence. “Somehow this simple message has not gotten through,” and so on.
The version the Crown prosecutor gave her to read didn’t indicate who it was from, but it didn’t have to. “Based on the way it was written, I would deduct that it was Sen. Duffy,” Proulx said.
Duffy couldn’t be arsed to work out on his own why he was a Conservative, couldn’t pay for his own political bric-a-brac, couldn’t give his own thank-you gifts to friends and family who did him favours. He couldn’t even keep up his cherished Old Duff persona. The defence admits pretty much all of this. It’s not that he didn’t do these things, his lawyer argues on his behalf, or even that it was all OK. It’s that what he did wasn’t, you know, criminal.
Judge Charles Vaillancourt will decide on that.
But criminal or not, the vast, arid emptiness of the way Mike Duffy conducted himself as a senator will follow him for the rest of his life.