What were those extra living expenses?
Long at home in Ottawa, Duffy still claimed close to allowable limit
Of the journalist’s damp dream that is the criminal trial of Mike Duffy, nothing thus far eclipses the handwritten explanation the suspended senator offered for his first lavish expense claim.
In fairness, the line in question appears to be in the handwriting of his executive assistant, but the odds are excellent that it was he who offered it up to her, and besides, as Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt has repeatedly heard here, Duffy certainly signed off on it and thus is responsible for it.
Now, generally speaking, Duffy broke his maiden as a senator in spectacular fashion: The expense form, which in those days mixed apples and oranges, or travel and living claims, on the same sheet, is a hodgepodge of scrawled numbers, crossed-out dates and hand-corrected figures.
Included in the $4,303.11 total he claimed was his first per diem — for living in the Ottawa area, where he had lived since 1971, and in the same house he once described in other Senate paperwork as “our home for the past seven years” — for Dec. 23, 2008, the day after his appointment was announced.
It was by way of explanation for the schemozzle of the form that the EA wrote the howler, “First travel as Senator — did not know to keep original receipts.”
Now, in the complicated relationship many Canadians have developed with the Senate and House of Commons — they understand and may even tolerate a certain level of pocket-picking so long as the greed is somewhat contained — outright nose-stretchers are something else. Duffy was 62 at the time of his appointment, which he had sought with well-documented ardour. And he’d spent almost four decades working as a national broadcast journalist, and one definition of a journalist is as the lucky sod who travels the country, if not the world, on someone else’s dime.
(As one of the breed, I can assure you I am more familiar with expense-claim forms than I am with some of the subjects I have written about with irritating faux authority. And I can also assure you that if the Senate ever wants to get really serious about calling its members to account, they should hire one or another of the ferocious accounting sharks I’ve dealt with at all the newspapers I’ve worked.)
Documents released early on in the trial showed that Duffy claimed the full $81.55 for the day after his appointment announcement.
But it was only Wednesday, with former Senate chief financial officer Nicole Proulx in the witness stand, that what a smart colleague calls the sheer indecency of the claim became clear.
Claims for National Capital Region (NCR) living expenses, Proulx said, are designed for “senators who incur costs to come to work in Ottawa.”
Because of the constitutional requirement that senators are appointed from various parts of Canada, as Duffy was for P.E.I., it appears they have to formally declare their property in the applicable province as their “primary residence.” So long as they have done that, Proulx said, they would be entitled to a National Capital Region (NCR) expense budget of what was then up to a maximum of $20,000 a year.
But there is no claim conscription, not even in the Senate.
“The decision to submit a claim is the senators’. So they should not submit claims if they did not incur costs,” Proulx said.
And, for every year he was in the Senate, Duffy signed such a form, either the Primary Residence Declaration or, the later iteration, the Declaration of Primary and Secondary Residences.
Part of each of those declarations reads as follows: “I therefore incur additional living expenses while I am in the NCR to carry out my parliamentary functions.”
So what were those additional living expenses? What on Earth could they have been?
On Dec. 23 of 2008, in that same Kanata house he and Heather had called home for seven years, he somehow racked up additional costs just to what, go to the Senate, as he did that very day, to be briefed by Proulx and others on his new job and responsibilities?
He was presumably living in the same house, wearing the same clothes, sleeping in the same bed, eating the same sort of stuff, but now it cost him more?
And he didn’t just claim the NCR per diem.
He claimed travel per diems, for a week of so-called “private” accommodation for the days he was in P.E.I., and so-called “full per diems” for other days (that means breakfast, lunch and dinner, and incidentals), and even “partial per diems” (that means for a single meal, not the whole shebang).
Now, Proulx said she didn’t think all of the various per diems qualified or were paid, but in the end, because of the $149 hospitality expense Duffy also submitted for dinner with a P.E.I. deputy minister, he ended up getting more than he’d asked for — $4,382.96, as opposed to $4,303.11.
Mike Duffy was a senator over the course of five fiscal years, three months of 2008, and four full years for each of the others.
In those four full years, the lowest amount he claimed for “additional living expenses” he incurred for living in his Kanata home, was $17,126.12; the maximum was very close to the maximum allowable, $19,989.58.
It cost him an extra $81,332.54 to live in the Ottawa area, where, you know, he’d lived for freaking ever.
No wonder Nigel Wright, whose $90,000 bank draft Duffy took to repay all those expenses plus interest, nearly lost his mind.