Duffy billed for B.C. trip at time grandchild was born
Taxpayers hit with $10,600 tab after senator stayed at his son’s condo
Mike Duffy billed taxpayers for a trip to British Columbia so he could speak at one event for a Conservative candidate in Victoria and oh, incidentally, meet his newborn grandchild in Vancouver, the suspended senator’s criminal trial heard Tuesday.
Precisely how this coincidence came to be hasn’t yet been revealed. But the facts are laid out clearly in the detailed diary Duffy kept, which has been entered as evidence in his trial on 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.
The morning of Dec. 9, 2010, Duffy’s daughter, Miranda, went to hospital in labour and gave birth to a boy by caesarean section that afternoon, at about the time Duffy and his wife Heather were boarding a plane in Ottawa. They arrived in Vancouver at 8 p.m., stayed at the condo of Duffy’s son, Gavin, and visited Miranda and the baby early the next afternoon.
Duffy hopped on a plane for Victoria a few hours later, spoke at a Christmas party organized by the Conservative candidate in Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, and was back in Vancouver by bedtime.
Two days later, after another visit to the hospital, Mike and Heather Duffy were back on a plane for Ottawa.
The total cost to taxpayers, according to travel expense claims filed in court: just over $10,600. That includes airfare, meals and $50 a night in compensation for staying in “private accommodations.”
The speech Duffy gave for Tory candidate Troy DeSouza came together on very short notice, DeSouza testified, over the phone from Victoria. His campaign manager had asked the Conservative party for a big-name speaker and learned Duffy would be attending scarcely a week in advance, which was great news.
“Other than the prime minister, he would have been the biggest draw for any party-slash-community event in the country,” DeSouza said. Duffy arrived as a surprise celebrity, to speak to about 250 attendees at the Friday evening event, he said.
“Talk about a surprise — until Monday, it was a surprise to you,” prosecutor Mark Holmes put to him. “That’s right,” DeSouza said. Duffy’s speech, “a bunch of stories and crowd-pleasing jokes, a bit of his background and what’s happening in Ottawa,” went over very well, he said.
The trial has heard the Senate doesn’t pay for senators’ trips to fundraisers, which is how Duffy described the event in his diary. DeSouza said that was only an incidental element in his party, which raised $1,500 for a Victoria shelter for homeless veterans.
It’s also specifically forbidden for senators to use their office budgets to help in party nomination campaigns or for election campaigns. But DeSouza was already his party’s nominee … for an election that hadn’t yet been called.
“You’d be campaigning as soon as you received the official nomination from your party,” DeSouza testified. But strictly speaking, there no election had been called.
The trial also heard on Tuesday from an old friend of Duffy’s about a different set of the charges the senator faces, to do with allegedly funnelling Senate money through a CTV colleague to pay for things it might have been difficult to get the Senate to cover.
The old friend, William Kittelberg ( better known professionally as Bill Rodgers), was paid $2,000 for friendly advice on energy and pipelines at the same time as Duffy was trying to help him land a job at Enbridge, he testified.
Like Duffy, Rodgers was a broadcaster-turned-politico, a communications adviser who had been let go from then-minister Peter Kent’s office.
“I think Sen. Duffy might have suggested, ‘You know, you really should get in touch with Enbridge’,” Rodgers said on the stand. “And I know he had some contact with Enbridge as well, so …”
“How do you know that, sir?” Holmes’ fellow prosecutor Jason Neubauer asked him.
“Because he’d told me. He’d said he had been talking to a certain executive at Enbridge and that I should be in touch with them,” Rodgers said.
This was late 2011 or early 2012, Rodgers testified. At the same time, Duffy had decided the two men’s friendly phone conversations were so useful that he ought to be paying Rodgers for his advice. He told Rodgers to make up a bill for $2,000.
But rather than send it to Duffy’s Senate office, which would have meant filling out all kinds of inconvenient paperwork to get a contract approved and to certify that Rodgers didn’t have any conflicts of interest, Duffy had him send it to Gerry Donohue, a buddy from Duffy’s days as a CTV broadcaster. Donohue was awarded several big contracts for writing and editing services with Duffy’s office, but redistributed the money to various other people whose services Duffy found useful.
Rodgers testified that he never thought of his talks with Duffy as work. But when Duffy said there was money to be had, Rodgers wrote up the invoice, sent it in, and cashed the cheque.
Meanwhile, he was having exchanges with Enbridge, one of the energy companies whose interests he was discussing with his senator friend. These exchanges culminated in a meeting with three Enbridge executives at the Château Laurier in May 2012, which lasted a couple of hours.
If the meeting was a job interview, it was unsuccessful.
In his cross-examination, Bayne got Rodgers to say the $2,000 payment was for genuine advice on real issues of public importance. He might have thought it was odd to send a bill to a third party, but the actual discussions were legitimate.
Back in the bad old days, when most gay men were firmly in the closet, a “beard” was the term used to describe a woman who might appear as a date at a gay man’s side at a public function.
But before that, it was slang for anyone who acted for someone else, in any sort of transaction, to conceal the person’s identity or intention.
So in that original sense were the disenchanted veteran Ronald Keenan and the three-time failed Conservative candidate Troy DeSouza beards for the suspended senator Mike Duffy, in that it’s alleged that they — and a great many others — inadvertently gave cover to Duffy’s free-spending, merry-travelling ways on the public dime.
Keenan and DeSouza testified by phone from British Columbia Tuesday at Duffy’s criminal trial, which is moving along at its usual glacial speed.
Their role as beards came, it is alleged, as Duffy and his wife, Heather, flew to the West Coast in December of 2010.
According to one set of Duffy documents, the disputed travel claims that are the basis for some of the 31 charges against him, that Dec. 9 to 12 trip was for “Senate business — speaking engagement and meetings,” another example of the P.E.I. senator’s ceaseless toiling on behalf of Canadians.
Yet according to another set of Duffy documents, his infamous diaries, the trip was all about daughter Miranda giving birth.
There was only one Senate event — a Conservative Christmas party-cum-charitable fundraiser organized by DeSouza, the local Tory candidate for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca who was campaigning well in advance of the 2011 election even being called — in the diaries, but four mentions of the momentous Miranda delivery and two notations of visits to see her and the baby in a Vancouver hospital.
DeSouza found out Duffy was coming to the Vancouver Island event only a few days before; he’d asked the party weeks earlier if it could rustle up a speaker, and was delighted when he was told at the last minute it would be Duffy.
Keenan, a 34-year air force veteran, was with other former servicemen outside the golf club that night, protesting the Conservative government’s treatment of veterans but hoping to talk to Duffy.
The little group never got the chance, but, according to Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, who routinely gives evidence in his cross-examinations and did so with Keenan, Duffy was doing “Senate business” inside the club, working the room and talking to other veterans.
Now senators, as Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt has heard repeatedly, have a broad discretion in determining what constitutes “Senate” or “public” business; the looseygoosey definition in the Senate administrative rules even specifically allows for “partisan” activities except during formal campaign and nomination periods.
But at its highest, in the very kindest light, Duffy spent about $10,000 — mostly for the business-class flights for him and Heather, though they also billed per diems and taxis, of course, because, you know, they could — of public money to give a single speech at a single Conservative event on Vancouver Island. That total doesn’t appear to count the couple’s flights to and from Victoria, and given Duffy’s welldocumented inability to find his wallet, it leaves open the question of who did.
There is little doubt that he was a popular speaker in Conservative circles; DeSouza was hardly the first witness to tout Duffy’s praises as the best draw, second only to Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself.
But being a star in a political party, perhaps least of all that one, is hardly akin to being an actual star. Yet Duffy seems to have had a grandiose vision of his power.
His old friend from their shared days at CTV, Bill Rodgers, also known as William Kittelberg, completed his testimony Tuesday.
He received a $2,000 cheque for chats he’d had about energy and other issues with Duffy, from the concrete-form company Duffy used to dispense a significant chunk of his office budget. Rodgers/Kittelberg never asked for money, and thought the thirdparty way of paying him was odd, but cashed the cheque nonetheless.
But more importantly, it appears from Duffy’s diaries (and kudos to Mychaylo Prystupa of the National Observer, who first pored through the redacted portions and dug all this up in April), Duffy was also trying to insert himself into the Northern Gateway pipeline issue, which was then heating up.
And it appears he was hoping to use Rodgers/Kittelberg.
Duffy had taken to calling various Enbridge Inc. senior executives, so often that the company felt the need to alert the Prime Minister’s Office that Duffy’s contacts were unsolicited and that he wasn’t representing Enbridge.
Graham White, the Enbridge manager of business communications, confirmed Tuesday in an email that an Enbridge government relations staffer called a policy adviser at the PMO in February of 2012 to set the record straight.
D’Arcy Levesque, vice-president of enterprise communications for Enbridge, also declined to retain Rodgers/Kittelberg, whom Rodgers/Kittelberg acknowledged meeting at Duffy’s behest.
“We (Duffy and Rodgers/Kittelberg) had been discussing the possibility of me consulting for Enbridge here in Ottawa,” he said.
Reading between the lines, it appears that someone, at Enbridge, if not the Senate or government, had twigged to the fact that Mike Duffy was meddling.
Being a star in a political party, perhaps least of all that one, is hardly akin to being an actual star.