Only hours after the prime minister had stood in the House of Commons and answered the opposition’s questions for the first time on what he might have known and when he might have known it with regards to the details of that $90,000 payment his then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, made (donated? loaned?) to then-Conservative Senator Mike Duffy, the Senate’s committee on internal economy met, again, to discuss just that.
This was the second time the committee had been asked to look into Duffy’s expenses. The first time around, it emerged that its final draft report was missing the parts that had originally mentioned how Duffy had been unwilling to cooperate with auditors, and how the language about primary residency was “unambiguous” – language that stayed in reports on two other embattled Senators, Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb. That time, the Duffy report had also been compiled and debated behind closed doors. This time, the room was full of reporters.
The committee had invited Duffy to join them Tuesday – twice, according to its legal counsel. Duffy had told reporters last week he wanted his story to be heard. But when quorum was finally achieved in the basement committee room in Centre Block sometime around 6:30 PM, Duffy was nowhere to be seen. Nor did he show his face for the next two and a half hours, the time it took the committee to discuss a few more embarrassing details about his expense filings; to agree to send the whole matter to the RCMP; and to reverse course on that earlier report that had allegedly been “whitewashed,” according to so much opposition rhetoric.
All three of those decisions deserve a bit of airing.
Duffy’s past expense filing patterns are not good. Gary O’Brien, the Senate Clerk, reviewed an earlier Deloitte audit and its findings on Duffy, including its discovery that there was a group of 12 days where the Senator submitted expense claims for per diems during a time period when he did not appear to have been in Ottawa. Instead, it seems he was in Florida. O’Brien relayed that Deloitte found this was not an isolated incident, and proceeded to list off a number of instances where Duffy had made per diem claims, and they had not been honoured. The review “represents a pattern that raises concerns,” he said.
As it turns out, “there were 49 days where per diems were claimed in Ottawa during a time period, according to the Deloitte report, that Senator Duffy does not appear to have been in Ottawa,” O’Brien said.
It gets worse. During questioning, Liberal Senator George Furey wondered about 18 days in August 2011 where Duffy claimed a per diem, but where not a single one was actually paid out. “Is that because Finance did not receive sufficient documentation for the claims?” he asked.
“They were not paid because we had a travel claim from Senator Duffy,” O’Brien replied. “We knew he was not in Ottawa. Therefore, we had conversations with his staff to reestablish that he was not in Ottawa. We had some empirical evidence, through a travel claim, that he was in Prince Edward Island.”
The Senate administration discovered this and disallowed the claims. In fact, of those 49 days when Duffy claimed per diems between April 2011 and March 2012, only 25 were paid out. That’s about a 50 per cent rate of success. That looks bad on Duffy, but perhaps on the Senate, too. For, while the claims were rejected, nobody seems to have noticed a pattern – or, at least, seen cause for concern. So, thank goodness for Deloitte?
“I don’t know exactly what the checks and balances are, but I think what they said was that… because of the Deloitte report – they wouldn’t normally have access to credit card information and phone records – that was what enabled Deloitte to pin down where he was,” Senator James Cowan told reporters after committee, assuring a moment later that, in his experience, the Senate finance office is “pretty rigorous.”
Going into the meeting, if you thought anyone on the Conservative side of the room was going to stand up for Duffy on Tuesday, you ought to have thought twice. It was Conservative Senator Larry Smith who, at the first opportunity, put forward a motion proposing that the committee send the entire issue off to be investigated by the “proper authorities” – ie. the RCMP.
And when the Liberals wanted to add on an amendment to that motion to specify that the Mounties ought to make sure that included “Senator Duffy’s repayment of $90,000 to the Government of Canada,” the only real debate was over whether the committee should be telling the cops what to do. In the end, the amendment passed unanimously.
As for that initial report the committee put forward on Duffy’s expenses? That was changed, too.
Where the committee’s final draft acknowledged Deloitte’s finding “that criteria for determining primary residence are lacking” and was to be addressed, the Liberals (Furey) added a whole paragraph, outlining that “to claim living expenses in the National Capital Region, any residence owned or rented by a senator must be a secondary residence for use by the senator while in the NCR for Senate business.” Further, the amendment went on, the committee would consider the language “to be unambiguous; and plainly if a senator resides primarily in the NCR, he or she should not be claiming living expenses for the NCR.”
And where the committee’s final report had its recommendations, the Liberals were even more specific. Furey suggested that the report be amended to conclude that, based on the evidence presented in the examination report, “while recognizing that Senator Duffy owns a residence in P.E.I. and spends considerable time there, his continued presence at his Ottawa residence over the years does not support such a declaration and is, therefore, contrary to the plain meaning of the word ‘primary’ and to the purpose and intent of the provisions of living allowance in the NCR.”
Just in case you missed it, that all translates as a concise message from the Liberals to the Conservatives that in layman’s terms goes like this: “F–k you.”
And what happened? Every member of the committee – including the Conservatives – voted to adopt those changes, to condemn Duffy exactly where he was initially praised. The expression is handy, but in this case, perhaps it wasn’t exactly like the Conservatives threw Duffy under the bus. It’s more like they just dropped him off at the police station.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan
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