Duffy’s bribery charge needs clarity

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/08/2015 (4036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After two days on the hot seat at the Sen. Mike Duffy bribery trial, Nigel Wright has given Canadians no reason to think his boss, the prime minister, was aware he personally paid Mr. Duffy’s expenses bill. But Canadians are no closer to understanding why the senator, alone, is on trial.

Mr. Wright, having resigned in 2013 as Stephen Harper’s chief of staff shortly after his secret cheque-writing became public, told the trial in Ottawa his primary job and overriding concern was to manage the Conservative government’s reputation and protect the prime minister.

And when the Senate expenses scandal grew to crisis, Mr. Wright’s management of the issue deepened.

Mr. Harper foolishly appointed Mr. Duffy, a longtime Ottawa resident, to be a senator from P.E.I. Mr. Duffy, working on government assurances, filed for expenses for living in Kanata, which he called his “secondary” residence. That snared him in a growing Senate spending scandal in 2012.

As details emerged, the PMO saw the Duffy matter as a real problem and wanted it ended quickly and quietly to contain the damage.

But Mr. Duffy was hard to bring to heel — he made clear he didn’t want to claim for anything he “was not entitled to” but he believed he was legitimately a P.E.I. senator — the government told him so when he was appointed.

Under mounting pressure from Mr. Wright, the senator agreed to repay the expenses, demanding assurance it would not imperil his claim to the Senate seat. But when the tab came in at $90,000-plus, he said he didn’t have that kind of money.

And at $90,000, Mr. Wright’s attempts to get the Conservative party to foot the bill also dissolved. So he wrote Mr. Duffy a cheque.

The disgraced senator is facing 31 charges laid by the RCMP, including numerous counts of fraud for expenses relating to residency, meals, flights and contracts he arranged. The bribery charge is the most serious.

And curious. The implication is Mr. Duffy took the money for what in his mind was a quid pro quo — the full details of this remain to be proven by the Crown.

Did he agree to go along with a plan that would save face for his party, as long as he was, as the saying goes, “made whole” on the deal? Or that he would keep his peace and stay out of the press, as long as he was reimbursed?

But if a bribe was accepted, how could it not have been offered? The question has hung over this affair, this government and the RCMP since charges were laid.

The string of emails filed as evidence to date makes clear Mr. Wright and senior staffers wanted desperately to keep Mr. Duffy out of the sights of the Deloitte audit into Senate expenses. They wanted Deloitte, and a Senate subcommittee, to declare repayment of the $90,000 resolved the matter.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

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Mr. Wright, in a March 2013 email, chastised two Tory senators for not “delivering” on that undertaking. And he said this: “Once we know that repayment will permit the subcommittee and Deloitte to state that the matter is resolved, then the repayment will follow forthwith.”

That seems to fly in the face of Mr. Wright’s — and the government’s — contention he wrote the cheque as a “good deed” and to do right by the taxpayer.

Evidently, it was not enough for the RCMP to pursue a charge against the man who made Mr. Duffy’s financial headache go away.

The RCMP found Mr. Duffy had less honourable motives in mind when he took the money, hence bribery. And why just Mr. Duffy? The testimony so far has not cleared that up.

The RCMP has refused to explain its decision. When the trial is over, it may owe Canadians a fuller story.