It’s unclear who, if anyone, is paying Mike’s Duffy’s legal bill
Aside from the who-knew-what-when in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, a matter that has been richly explored and will continue to be pecked at for the rest of Mike Duffy’s criminal trial, there’s one other urgent question obsessing National Post readers, at least, and perhaps a good many others.
It’s this: Given the Prince Edward Island senator’s professed impecuniousness back in 2013 — he told the prime minister’s then chief of staff, Nigel Wright, he didn’t have the money to repay $90,000 worth of expenses, even if he was inclined — how on earth is he paying for his very experienced, and thus very expensive, lawyer Don Bayne?
And the answer is, Duffy almost certainly isn’t.
Bayne is unable to say because of solicitor-client privilege.
When I asked him about it earlier this week, he mentioned a May 2015 profile of him by Ottawa Citizen writer Chris Cobb, wherein Cobb wrote that Bayne has been working pro bono for accused terrorist Hassan Diab, a Canadian academic who was extradited to France and is now in a Paris prison awaiting trial.
Bayne said the piece was accurate, and that he’s not sought any sort of retraction.
The story says Bayne stopped billing Diab five years ago, and quotes grateful Diab family members speaking about his kindness.
Cobb also described how selective Bayne is about taking on clients — he is 70 now, wiry and fit, but he has other business interests, so no longer carries a full caseload. Now, Bayne has only two, Diab and Duffy.
The reasonable inference — the only one really — is that Bayne is also working for Duffy pro bono, or close to it.
Duffy and his wife, Heather, did take out a $550,000 mortgage against their infamous Kanata home — this is the one where they’d lived for years but for which Duffy billed “additional living expenses” after he was appointed to the Red Chamber in December of 2009 — in late 2014.
But Bayne has been representing Duffy since the fall of 2013, and anyone who imagines that $550,000 would cover two full years of this top-drawer lawyer’s time is dreaming. It might pay for the disbursements — reams of paper and electronic emails, the organizing of this document-heavy case — and the time of Bayne’s junior, Jon Doody, but little else. Bayne’s bill — a senior lawyer, a winner of the prestigious G. Arthur Martin award for his “significant contribution to criminal justice” — would be astronomical.
Earlier this week, I gave a shorter version of this in an email to reader John Trought, one of dozens who have asked the money question.
“Bayne,” I told him, “is I believe working mostly pro bono.”
And Trought replied, “What is the difference between what Wright did and what Bayne is now doing?” What an excellent question. Both Wright and Bayne are independently wealthy men; Wright through his work at the private equity firm Onex Corp., and Bayne through Homestead Land Holdings Ltd., where he is a director and legal counsel. Homestead owns, according to its website, about 24,000 apartments in dozens of buildings across Ontario, and is the company founded by the father of Bayne’s wife, Sheila. Both men appear to be deeply principled.
Wright testified here that he was so offended by Duffy’s piggery (my word, not his) that he decided he’d repay his expenses, because he felt the Canadian taxpayer deserved it. He also attempted to make good the promises he’d made Duffy in convincing him that he was in the wrong, ethically if not legally. Wright said he believed that he was doing a “good deed” by paying the money back, and that that was one of the reasons he kept it relatively quiet. (He also wrote “Senate expenses” on his bank draft, so he surely wasn’t pretending it was for anything or anyone else.)
Similarly, Bayne told Cobb in the Citizen piece that he was “attracted to real, substantial cases where there is an important issue at stake. I truly believe in the case of the person I represent.”
His every action in court — where he has been indefatigable in Duffy’s defence, objecting frequently, aggressively grilling those witnesses, like Wright, whose evidence could be damaging to his client — suggests a man who isn’t just a hired gun, but a believer.
If so, then in that way too the two are alike: Wright is considered to be a loyal Harper soldier, a believer.
And both men have demonstrated that despite their principles, they are also perfectly capable of the sort of hard-headed realpolitik pragmatism required of both a senior staffer in a prime minister’s office and a criminal defence lawyer. Wright did it every day in the service of the PM, as Bayne does in the service of Duffy.
Interestingly only one of them — Bayne — is likely to be deemed heroic.
Pro bono is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase pro bono publico, meaning “for the public good.” I confess to struggling with the “public” part of that. It’s certainly for Mike Duffy’s good.
Just think of it: The bottom line, whatever else, is that the Old Duff always seems to get his bills paid by someone else.