Farewell Ottawa, Hello Friendly Lane?
He was called many things, few of them flattering. He may have been the greatest fundraising machine on two legs the Tories ever had but, before long, he became a pain in the ass to his party, the Conservative senate leadership, the prime minister who appointed him, Stephen Harper, and many, many others.
Today Mike Duffy times out. He's 75. Time to bid farewell to the Red Chamber, perhaps to savor life as the Cavendish Cottager of Friendly Lane, Prince Edward Island.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, here are a few paras from posts I penned in years past.
March 1, 2013
- Everybody's got a Mike Duffy problem these days. Prince Edward Island has a Mike Duffy problem. Sideshow Steve Harper has a Mike Duffy problem. The Senate of Canada has a Mike Duffy problem. The government of Ontario has a few Mike Duffy problems. Mike Duffy has a Mike Duffy problem.
Prince Edward Island has a Senator who might not be a senator at all. Steve Harper appointed an Ottawa resident to be a Senator for a province a good distance away. The Senate has a guy who may not be entitled to sit with them and who has been collecting pension benefits, a salary and housing perks. The government of Ontario has a guy who has registered himself to vote there, has voted there, has an Ontario healthcare card and has availed himself of all manner of cardiac care, up to and including bypass surgery, on the Ontario taxpayer's dime when he's ineligible because he's resident in some other province. Mike Duffy sort of shares all of these problems in one or more ways.
May 16, 2013 - Enter the Thin Man
...Mike Duffy, Stephen Harper's most productive little piggy, bares his soul... to Harper's Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright. And this is where a small problem might just turn into a huge problem for those at the very top.At this point, I want to tell you a fairy tale. Chief of Staff Wright, on learning that Duffy has repeatedly raided the collection plate, absolutely does not go to the guy he works for and says, "Boss, we've got a huge problem here. Duffy's been milking the public purse. The auditors are hot on his heels."
But Nigel Wright doesn't do that although Wright would almost certainly have to do that so Steve could decide whether to hand Duffy a Tory blue pink slip. No, not at all. Wright, instead, makes sure Steve has no say in the matter and simply hands Duffy a cheque, drawn on his very own account, and a bag of magical dust to make it all go away. And then Wright, knowing that the auditors are going to have plenty of questions about all of these "misunderstandings" orders Duffy to remain silent. And Wright does this entirely of his own initiative without Harper knowing anything, nothing at all about any of it.
And they all lived happily ever after - not. Because this isn't a fairy tale. What it actually is isn't exactly clear but it is coming to look a lot like Harper's right hand man knew Duffy had misappropriated public money (call that what you will) and then conspired with Duffy to conceal it from the auditors and who knows who else might look into it, maybe the police?
At this point we get into books that deal with questions of "over five thousand dollars" or "under five thousand dollars."
This is probably a good point at which to revisit the RCMP role that led to this flawed investigation and the curious notion of the Immaculate Bribe or Precium Immaculata, the virgin birth of the crime of bribery in which a bribe is criminally accepted that no one actually offered.
You got a sense that this was going to be a political operation when someone in the senior ranks of the RCMP leaked an email from Commissioner Bob Paulson strictly forbidding his senior officers from any contact with any MPs or Senators without the approval of the office that reported to Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews. Ouch..ssss... feel the burn?
And what of the investigating officer, Corporal Greg Horton.
In his Information, Horton relates a letter received from Nigel Wright's counsel stating that four senior officials of the Prime Minister's Office - the Chief of Staff, the Assistant Chief of Staff, the Director of Issue Management and the Chief Counsel who was also Harper's personal legal adviser, were all aware of the Wright-Duffy deal.
Hands up everybody who believes Nigel Wright was the lone gunman, that he acted alone in his under-the-table deal to funnel money to Mike Duffy.
Hands up everybody who believes Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy are old jogging buddies.
Hands up everybody who believes Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy are old pals from their university days.
Hands up everybody who believes Nigel Wright bails out MPs and Senators with money problems, 90-grand at a pop, just because.
Hands up everybody who believes Nigel Wright, as chief of staff to prime minister Harper, would pull this skulduggery behind his boss's back without so much as a 'by your leave.'
Hands up everybody who believes Benjamin Perrin, PMO chief legal counsel and personal legal advisor to the prime minister, upon learning of the under-the-table deal to funnel money to Mike Duffy, would have cooperated with Nigel Wright and would have chosen to conceal that from the most important client he will have in his life and thereby breach his most fundamental professional obligations to that most important client for all time.
Hands up everyone who believes that Woodcock and van Hemmen would also have dummied up to keep Stephen Harper in the dark about this potentially explosive gambit.
Hands up everyone who believes that top Tory senators, getting wind of the deal and agreeing to launder committee reports concerning their investigation into Mike Duffy, would go to such great, personal risk without assurances that their prime minister was directing the operation.
Hands up everyone who believes that Wright, Perrin, Woodcock, van Hemmen, as well as senators LeBreton, Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen knew fully what was going on but Stephen Harper knew nothing.
Hands up everyone who believes Stephen Harper only discovered the existence of the Wright-Duffy affair after it broke in public.
Hands up everyone who believes that Stephen Harper wasn't trying to hide anything when all e-mails, documents, memos, phone messages, voice mails and documents of any possible description pertaining to Wright-Duffy mysteriously vanished from the prime minister's office.
Okay, let me count the hands. Hey, how come there's no hands? None, not one, really? Alright, let's try this one.
But here's the thing. Horton then seems to accept their implausible assertion that Harper knew nothing of it. He gives no basis for that except the assertions of people who were either principals in or privy to the commission of an apparent and serious crime. It's almost as though the fix was in.
The thing is , what did Duffy do to piss Harper off ? Nothing reported about the debacle in court is worse than normal Harper operating practice.
ReplyDeleteWhen Cprl. Horton Hears a Who , knowing it was untrue, presented the story of the mussel car dog buying excellent adventure it was obvious that this was a setup. It made one wonder just how compromised the horsemen and the Ontario prosecutorial puppets really are
Harper's malevolence and incompetence to someone he though was an easy target backfired with the order of the big boot at election time.
Harper lost control of this fiasco when he kept getting snarled in his own lies.
DeleteDuffy's ill-fated email, the one leaked to Bob Fife, was the match to gasoline. Had Duffy kept that to himself instead of sharing it with his close friends, i.e. half of Conservative Ottawa, the cover-up probably would have been manageable. The account Duffy related in that email was accurate. Most importantly, it was contemporary with the events that unfolded. It wasn't something fabricated after the fact unlike the shifting accounts from Harper, Wright, the Tory leadership in the Senate and others.
So Duff is out of work. He still owes big $$$s to Bayne, his defence counsel. Maybe he'll sell his Ottawa-area townhouse to cover that and relocate to his place on Friendly Lane, Cavendish, PEI.
He'll do alright. He's got a CBC pension, a CTV pension and a Senate pension although he's got a real lifestyle/spending problem.
His biggest challenge may be obscurity. He's used to hobnobbing with the Ottawa in-crowd. I hear many of them are now weary of Ol' Duff and his "Harper did me wrong" refrain.
I thought I read that Bayne did it pro bono.
ReplyDeleteNot intentionally, Rumley, it just turned out that way more or less.
DeleteWell, your visceral dislike of Sweaty Pate Duffy comes through clearly. I didn't like him much either, because he was obviously at heart a Con as a reporter, so never paid him the slightest attention.
ReplyDeleteI'd question whether it was the first time in history that someone got to be a senator from a province where they no longer resided. That CTV woman originally from Saskatchewan as a start. She obviously had worked out of Toronto CTV for years. Another closet Con. Seems to happen when you make a few bucks and minor fame and think yourself better than the hoi polloi. Gretzy is a Con to his core, and also so is that yapping fool Don Cherry who made ridiculous Con-type statements at election gatherings. They made zero sense to anyone but himself and the chorus of equally dumb racists cheering him on to even greater heights of absurdity. harper's rule was a dark age, and he, Joe Oliver and kenney are who I viscerally hated. Ruiners of the country one and all. Oliver as environment minister was beyond bad taste and just plain nasty in response to anyone questioning his BS. kenney, well, we all know how he turned out, as puffball would-be-emperor of the tarsands and privatizing twat of the decade. Duffy's small taters compared to those ideological, bought-and-paid-for selfish schmucks who hate mere citizens, regarding them as plump chickens to pluck and barbecue on a spit for their own good.
What I remember as a takeaway at the end of the affair is simply this: Duffy was charged on 31 counts, and beat every single one. Game, set and match. And the judge took time to lambaste the PMO without naming names, and the amateur-hour RCMP case and resulting charges as well. Ole Nige ran for Blighty like a scalded cat to make some easy money, and harper blew the election on his racist horsemanure, pleading desperately to the electorate for his job and no niqab. A vindictive piece of absolute shite, that man.
So venal Duffy had wanted more money, because he wasn't getting full reimbursement for his kiss-ass speaking tours touting harper Con-ery, or so he said. The establishment Senate, who refused to speak to him during and after his court vindication, wobbled around in shock at the man's exposure of the cosy "upper class" snobs answerable to no one but who lapped up the gravy off the public plate with glee, while claiming legislative infallibility. They still do for that matter.
So having read your archived words so far, I find myself strangely unmoved at the rehash, because well, when the chips were down and everyone expected him to crash in flames, Duffy didn't and thus poked a finger in harper's eye. Deserves a tin medal for services rendered to Canada by the strangest route possible, in my view. "The Duff Order of Canada" with ribbons.
I knew Duffy back when we worked for the same outfit in Ottawa in the early 70s. In his prime he was a helluva good reporter.
DeleteAs for Duffy's triumph before Mr. Justice Vaillancourt, I did a bit of informal consulting with a member of his legal team. I thought I had the key to Duffy's defence and laid it out. There were two distinct accounts - Duffy's and Team Harper's. Only one could possibly be telling the truth.
I pointed out that Duffy's initial email that was leaked to CTV's Bob Fife proved that Duffy was telling the truth. In it he set out the key elements of the deal - the money from Wright, keeping his mouth shut, refusing to cooperate with the Deloitte auditors and the promise that the PMO would see to it that the Senate would "go easy on" Duffy. That email was contemporaneous with each of those events. They happened. Wright wrote the cheque. Duffy (sort of) kept his mouth shut. Duffy refused to cooperate with the auditors and the Tory Senate leadership, Dave Tkachuk and Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, white washed the audit report on Duffy. By contrast, Team Harper made a litany of after-the-fact assertions that were contradicted by the known facts.
I sent my analysis to Duffy's legal pal. He later said many flattering things about my contribution to MD's acquittal. So, Bill, in terms of your remarks you don't know what you're talking about.
And, Bill, I was made privy to certain information and documents. From these I did what defence counsel always do - I put together a theory of the defence. You start with known and indisputable facts. Against this base you evaluate other evidence, other statements, looking for things that should be yet are missing, things that are inconsistent, contradictions and ambiguities. Like panning for gold, eventually you separate the nuggets from the sand. With experience and a mind trained for such things that can be great fun. I once did quite a bit of fraud work and that entailed a very similar intellectual process, especially when challenged by the really accomplished swindlers.
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Thank you all for reading,
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