Makeup claim had no foundation
Mike Duffy Trial: Senator makes stand on Pancake Hill
It was never going to be Hill 70, that storied battle the Canadian Corps won at enormous human cost in 1917, but it was nonetheless almost Mike Duffy’s version, almost the hill he chose to die on.
It was the spring of 2009 when the now-suspended senator from P.E.I. almost lost it on what we might call Mount Pancake.
Duffy had been a senator for the proverbial New York minute, officially sworn in only on Jan. 26. But he hit the ground running, at least in senatorial fashion — immediately travelling hither and yon, filing myriad expenses and submitting his first invoice for makeup to the Senate’s finance people.
To alert followers of Duffy’s ongoing criminal trial here, the makeup issue will ring familiar; Jacqueline Lambert, the makeup artist in question, already has testified, mostly about a 2010 photo shoot for which she made up Duffy and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But that first occasion was on March 5, almost a year earlier, and it involved just Duffy, making him up for a formal portrait.
Lambert submitted her $300 invoice, and Duffy in turn submitted it to the Senate administration.
Now, some may hold that this was simply a function of Duffy having been in television so much of his adult life that he considered it normal, to which I would reply that they’ve never seen Rosemary Barton, the great CBC reporter who is covering the trial, as she, without a fuss, does her own makeup at the courthouse.
(Makeup, in other words, may well be a necessity for TV types, but as in other spheres of life, there are those who are helpless and those who are not.)
In any case, Duffy’s invoice caused a bit of a stir in Senate administration, where discretion rules, such that, according to Nicole Proulx, then the Senate’s chief financial officer, it made it all the way up the chain to her desk.
As she put it, “Because of the uniqueness of the request ... it eventually was brought to my attention ... (junior staffers) were asking, ‘What do we do with this?’”
Proulx called Duffy’s executive assistant, told her “this was not something that could be paid with Senate funds,” and hoped to settle it informally.
But the invoice didn’t go away, she told prosecutor Jason Neubauer, and after several conversations with Duffy’s EA, Lambert finally spat it out: Would the senator withdraw the request?
“I was told no,” she said. “Senator Duffy wanted to pursue this.”
Thus on April 9 that year, Proulx wrote Duffy, breaking it to him that the cost of makeup service “is not an expenditure that is allowed” under the bazillion Senate guidelines and rules, and formally rejected the claim.
She pointed out that if Duffy wanted to pursue the matter, he could submit a request to the Senate’s internal economy committee, essentially the Red Chamber’s executive committee.
“Did you hear anything further?” Neubauer asked.
“Yes,” Proulx replied. “Actually it was almost, it was to be discussed at the steering committee of internal economy, but just before they got to the item, the chair said it was being withdrawn by Senator Duffy.”
(Had the senator from Prince Edward Island actually come to his senses and pulled it? Or had the chair taken one look at the invoice, seen the madness, and done it for him? It’s unclear.)
For the record, the Senate never again saw a makeup bill from Duffy.
Instead, when he called Lambert again to do his makeup for a G8-related youth summit in 2010 with the PM, he told her to submit her invoice to Maple Ridge Media, one of two companies his old friend Gerry Donohue was using on Duffy’s behalf to cut cheques for speechwriters, his fitness trainer, and the like.
Lambert was duly paid May 25, 2010, by Maple Ridge for that service; it was never established whether or how she was paid for the 2009 Duffy-alone photo shoot.
One thing has come clear from Proulx’s evidence, and this was merely alluded to, is that Duffy was known as a bit of a handful.
At one point in 2012, he wrote a Senate finance official a snippy note complaining that her staff had screwed up and sent the wrong information to the Canada Revenue Agency about Donohue’s billings — for the second consecutive year.
“Somehow,” Duffy sniffed, “this simple message (the right information) has not got through.”
The letter wasn’t signed, Neubauer pointed out, so how did Proulx know it was from Duffy?
“Based on the way it was written,” she said evenly, “I would deduce it was from Senator Duffy.”
The contractor apple didn’t fall far from the senatorial tree: Donohue himself raged about the mistakes with unbecoming righteousness.
Given that Donohue wrote on all four contracts he had with Duffy that he was providing “editorial” and “writing services” when he was doing nothing of the sort himself, and given that Duffy certified on each one that Donohue had done that very work, it was all a bit rich.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, in other words, is an ungrateful senator — and his favourite contractor.
Had the senator from Prince Edward Island actually come to his senses and pull edit? Or had the chair taken one look at the in voice, seen the madness, and done it for him?