Duffy fills court with gems
Effluent testimony: Senator talks of devotion to public service, journalism
nd so it came to pass that Mike Duffy was at least briefly healed, for such is the sweet power of revenge.
On Tuesday morning, the former veteran broadcaster and beleaguered senator from Prince Edward Island took the witness stand at his criminal trial on 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.
This medically frail 69-yearold man — and his lawyer, Don Bayne, already has made much of this, suggesting Duffy was particularly vulnerable to the brutish charms of the dapper set from former prime minister Stephen Harper’s office — has had two open-heart surgeries, suffers from diabetes and osteoarthritis, is on 14 medications and goes to bed with a CPAP machine forcing air into his lungs so he doesn’t wake up every 40 seconds because of sleep apnea.
And yet, this particular morning, Duffy talked almost nonstop for two hours, barely pausing for breath, never short of wind: It was a miracle.
It was less testimony than effluence, mind — a mix of family history right back to Duffy’s paternal grandfather’s paternal grandfather and on his maternal side allegedly back to “Napoleonic times”; the recounting of every job the young Duffy ever had at every obscure radio station in the Maritimes and what each paid; the name of every person who hired him or whose hand he shook and in general, name-dropping on an earthshaking scale (complete, in some cases, with voices to match, as for former PM John Diefenbaker, his own late mother and Harper); his devotion to public service and yes, o be still heaving stomach, to journalism; his faux-modest recitation of his various scoops and, of course, the list of his medications and illnesses and close calls. (At one point, he told Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt, who appeared to be listening most raptly, that when he had his first open-heart surgery in 2006, it was for a single bypass, because the triple required the patient go on a heart-lung machine and with that, “there’s a danger you lose part of your memory.” He later had the triple in 2013, shortly after he was booted from the Senate. Anyone in that courtroom can safely report his memory emerged undamaged.)
The gems never stopped, nor the revelations.
This was Duffy the feminist, the social activist, the traumatized. Consider the following: On the people hit hardest by layoffs:
The real reason he quit CTV in December of 2008 and accepted Harper’s invite to the Senate, Duffy said, is linked to a big round of job cuts the network had recently made.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been through a big corporate layoff, Mr. Bayne,” he said, “but it is awful. It hurts the people laid off, but it kills the people who are left behind.”
So with that background, he said, he went home that night and talked things over with his wife, Heather.
“She said, ‘I’ll do whatever you want to do, but if you go (from CTV), it’ll give the bean counters more money” and perhaps in that way the jobs of some young people could be saved.
He did it for the kids! He was sacrificing himself for the youth!
On how the trial reminded him of his days as a court reporter for the Charlottetown Guardian:
Walking the courthouse halls “reminded me of those days, and it’s been a humbling experience … how many people ... make mistakes and how we need more treatment centres for the poor and disadvantaged.” See how he cares! On when he realized he was truly bitten by the politics/journalism bug:
At the 1967 Progressive Conservative convention in Toronto that elected Robert Stanfield, Duffy said, “I realized it was a spectacle, but it was a spectacle that mattered. It became to me a fascination and it became what I commanded my life to.”
By comparison to all this, he mentioned his first wife, Nancy Mann, but in passing.
He was working like a dog, he said, at CBC Radio until he was lured to the TV side. He turned them down three times, he said, finally telling CBC, “Do you see any fat people on TV?” and finally went only with the promise he could go back to radio if he failed on the tube.
For a time, he said, he was the “fireman,” the reporter who kept a bag packed and was off travelling the world as big stories broke. Then he spent two months on the road covering the 1979 election, and when he came home, “There was a lawyer’s letter waiting, your wife wants a divorce. It was my fault. So I lost my kids, they moved away.”
He calls it “my lost decade,” and said that during it, “every time I walked by a schoolyard I wondered what my kids were doing. … That’s my guilt for having worked so hard.”
You see how he made even that an ennobling tale: Mike Duffy worked so hard, he lost his first marriage and his kids.
And then, portentously, he told Bayne, “I was pretty depressed. You can’t lose your kids and not feel it.
“I’m a lover,” he said. “It’s just very hard.”
He spoke fondly of the good old days in journalism, when the CBC once hired three constitutional experts to privately brief the on-camera stars before a big decision came down, as if actual journalists couldn’t amply brief themselves. “They spent money on journalism!” Duffy crowed.
By day’s end, he and Bayne had entered a more traditional phase, where the lawyer asked questions and Duffy answered them. In the scheme of things, they have only begun to get to the meat of the case.
But it was very clear how it will go.
Duffy told a story about former PM Harper. Hubert Lacroix had just been appointed to head the CBC and Duffy asked what was the story on him. Harper, Duffy said in his Harper voice, replied basically, “‘Oh I dunno. The boys in Montreal say he’s a good businessman.’
“That’s when I knew that Stephen Harper didn’t always tell the whole truth,” said Mike Duffy, as if he had the patent on that too.
And yet, this particular morning, Duffy talked almost non-stop for two hours, barely pausing for breath, never short of wind: It was a miracle.
MOHAWK SUMMER
Duffy travelled on the road with the Canadian rock band The Beavers in the summer of 1964 at the age of 18. The band members, who sported matching mohawk haircuts, had him travel in advance to cities to set up for their arrival. They later changed their name to the Great Scots.
PAID HIS WAY
Duffy was an ambitious and shrewd young journalist, freelancing stories about football games in his mid-teens, and later working any small radio jobs he could get. In 1967, he paid his own way to Toronto to cover the Progressive Conservative convention for a Halifax radio station.
AILING DOWN THE AISLE
Duffy suffered a heart attack three days before he was set to wed his current wife, Heather, in 1992. The two had met years earlier, when she was his nurse for another ailment. Duffy said he went through a similar emotional conundrum when his daughter was born precisely the same hour that his father died.
HEALTH ISSUES
Duffy’s health is poor. He takes 14 medications daily to treat his heart disease, diabetes and ulcers, and sleeps with a device to treat apnea. He has six doctors, and has been a patient with the University of Ottawa Heart Institute for two decades. Duffy has had open heart surgery twice, including two years ago.
COTTAGE QUESTION
When Stephen Harper asked him to sit in the Senate in late 2008, Duffy says he suggested he represent Ontario instead of Prince Edward Island. But Duffy says Harper was adamant it be P.E.I., and was fully aware that Duffy owned only a cottage there that he intended to winterize in the future as a retirement home.