Duffy trial illustrates the oddities of Ottawa
OTTAWA — This is one Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God weird town, as a brief recap of the evidence heard on Day 11 of the Mike Duffy fraud trial so nicely illustrates.
1) Yes, the suspended senator from Prince Edward Island got countless pictures of himself and assorted tchotchkes framed at taxpayer expense, but only because of the insane demand on parliamentarians for memorabilia and signed photos. What’s a fella to do when the masses are beating at the doors, crying for their photos of The Duff ?
And besides, when Duffy first met Jiffy Photo owner Mark Vermeer, he stipulated that “the personal (work) was to be kept separate from the professional.”
Why, Duffy lawyer Don Bayne elicited from Vermeer that “on several occasions,” Duffy and/or his wife, Heather, actually did pay privately for personal work done! On several occasions!!
(Note: These personally paid invoices or receipts, unlike the 19 taxpayer-paid bills, including for enlargements of shots of Duffy, the missus and their daughter and grandson, are not in evidence before Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt, at least not yet.)
2) You might imagine that Duffy, for decades an alleged national broadcaster and ex- journalist (a “great” one, according to what Prime Minister Stephen Harper once scrawled on a picture of the two of them together), would be capable of writing his own speeches.
But no. In fact, shortly after his 2009 appointment to the Senate, Duffy paid his friend L. Ian MacDonald, another former journalist and chief speech writer for then prime minister Brian Mulroney, $7,000 to write what’s apparently called in the biz “a core speech” that could be given often and would take the “high road with a sense of history,” as MacDonald testified.
Duffy still has the speech on his personal website, under a byline that says, “By Senator Mike Duffy.” It’s entitled Why I Am A Conservative, and it’s pretty darned good, although the many flattering references to Mulroney are now perhaps more fully explained.
3) Matt Donohue, one of the directing minds and principal shareholders of two companies Duffy used to pay the various people who did work for him as a senator, even when they weren’t expecting to be paid, didn’t know that his own father was merrily writing cheques to said various people.
Donohue’s father, Duffy crony Gerry Donohue, will be called to testify, but is at the moment ill and just out of hospital.
Donohue- the- Younger was called to the stand presumably because, as a director and employee of the two companies in question (Maple Ridge Media Inc. and Ottawa ICF), he could shed a little light on the corporate structures. This he did, sort of. Donohue-the-Younger and his mother, Gail, were the principal owners of both companies, he said. She had 60 per cent of the businesses; he had 40 per cent. His father, her husband, didn’t have signing authority either for Maple Ridge Media or Ottawa ICF (the former had a name change sometime in 2009, and the ICF stands for Insulating Concrete Forms). Donohue-the-Elder wasn’t an employee of either company, and aside from giving his son advice and the like, played no role.
Yet the judge has heard that Donohue- the- Elder was in a veritable chequewriting frenzy — to Duffy’s makeup artist, office intern, Jiffy Photo, the various folks who wrote speeches for Duffy, Duffy’s fitness-trainer-cum-mobile think-tank, etc. — much of which appeared to be news to Donohue-the-Younger.
By May of 2010, he said, his interest in the company was “drifting” as a result of “a particularly sticky customer” who had “said inappropriate things” because of his age; he is just now 30.
He told prosecutor Mark Holmes, who read off a list of some of the recipients of his father’s cheques to various Duffy consultants or service providers, that he’d never heard of them. Asked if he knew why Maple Ridge received a $10,500 cheque from the Government of Canada in April of 2009, Donohue-the-Younger replied, “A tax refund?”
Some short time later, he received a cheque for the exact same amount — his salary was $2,625 a month, and the cheque amount added up to four months’ pay — but saw no connection between the two. “Other than my usual monthly pay,” he said, “I can’t think of any relationship between them (the two cheques) other than coincidence.”
Now, Occam’s Razor says that given two competing theories, the simple one is always best, so perhaps Donohue-the-Younger is right. And he’s not yet been cross-examined by Bayne, who often draws out from witnesses information to balance out the Duffy picture (such as the “several occasions” the Jiffy Photo owner said the Duffys paid out of their own funds).
But why the heck the suspended senator would choose a construction company (that’s what Ottawa ICF did, and before it Maple Leaf Media) to funnel a goodly part of his annual office and research budget, many of the expenses allowable under the Senate non-rules in any case, beggars the imagination.
So then, an ex-journalist who pays for a speech from the heart by another ex-journalist (it’s L. Ian’s heart on display in that speech, not M. Duffy’s, after all); an insulated concrete forms company that pays a senator’s bills, and a crazy demand by Canadians for pictures of a rotund former TV personality: one weird town.
As L. Ian ended that speech, and here he was speaking of Canadian political leaders, “They have all stood on the shoulders of giants, the ordinary people of this party and this country.”
Stood on their shoulders to better pick their pockets, more like.