Public Works kept in dark about Duffy, documents reveal
OTTAWA — When a cheque from Sen. Mike Duffy in the amount of about $90,000 was delivered to the Senate in late March, no one in the Senate publicly announced that Duffy’s bill had been repaid.
Apparently, they didn’t share the details of the payment with the Receiver General — the department that oversees deposits into and withdrawals from government accounts. Rather, the Receiver General only found out after a deposit had been made.
So when reporters got in touch to verify the Receiver General actually received a cheque from Duffy, the department repeatedly said it wasn’t in possession of the cheque and referred questions back to the Senate.
Here ’s what Public Works and Government Services Canada, which houses the Receiver General, was ready to send out on July 2 in response to a reporter’s question about the cheque: “The Receiver General for Canada only receives deposit summary from federal departments including the Senate with the corresponding details being kept by departments.”
That line was sent to the deputy receiver general — or deputy minister for the department — for approval.
“This makes no sense to me,” Michelle d’Auray, the deputy receiver general, wrote in an email to her media team.
“There is no deposit info but we get deposit summary? What does that mean?”
A copy of the emails, which included the back-and-forth between a reporter from The Hill Times newspaper and the department, were released to Postmedia News under the access-to-information law.
The line that went out instead was this: “Any payment by Senator Duffy would have been remitted directly to the Senate and subsequently deposited by that institution into the Government’s bank account. Receiver General is not in possession of this information.”
This is the same department that raised concerns about the lack of any discernible paper trail on the Duffy payment, financed by Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff. In previous emails released to Postmedia News, an access-to-information officer was curious about why Public Works had no documents on Duffy, though the cheque was made out to the Receiver General.