The willingness of the Senator from Kanata to take the money, a $90,000 personal cheque with which he was able to repay the expenses he falsely claimed, is unsurprising: it is of a piece with his behaviour throughout this affair. But it is hard to imagine what Nigel Wright could have been thinking.
It would be questionable, at best, for anyone to make such a large payment to a senator, whose responsibilities, let us remember, include voting on government bills. But of all the people who might legitimately make such a payment, the prime minister’s chief of staff would seem the last; if, likewise, the prime minister’s chief of staff were looking for someone on whom to shower his benevolence, he could surely have found someone other than a sitting legislator. To have done so, what is more, even as an outside audit of Duffy’s expenses was underway, is simply beyond belief.
All sorts of questions arise. Was it, first of all, a gift or a loan? If it were a loan, Wright would be obliged to record it as an asset in filings with the ethics commissioner. We are assured by anonymous sources that there was no expectation of repayment, i.e., that it was a personal gift. But if so, Duffy would arguably be prohibited from accepting it under the Senate Conflict of Interest code. (“Neither a Senator, nor a family member, shall accept … any gift or other benefit, except compensation authorized by law, that could reasonably be considered to relate to the Senator’s position.”) Either way, there appears to have been no disclosure of the arrangement — if the prime minister’s spokesman is to be believed, not even to the prime minister.
Indeed, when Duffy announced, back in February, that he would repay the money, he gave no hint that, in fact, it was the prime minister’s chief of staff who would be paying, though the two had arranged it just days before. Nor, one assumes, would we have ever learned of this clandestine agreement, had it not leaked out. Which raises another question: why are we finding this out now? Who leaked it, and why? Does it have anything to do with last week’s report of a possible RCMP investigation into the expenses of Duffy and two other senators?
Perhaps it was, as Tory insiders claim, merely a gesture of friendship on Wright’s part, a matter of helping an old pal out of a jam. But the public should not be put in the position of having to wonder whether it was more than that. Among the many further questions one would like answered: What undertakings, if any, did Duffy make in return for the money? The auditors’ report notes that Duffy refused all further cooperation with them once the repayment was made. CTV quotes him as saying, in a leaked email: “I stayed silent on the orders of the PMO.” What did he mean? What promises, if any, did Wright make to secure his help in making an embarrassing story go away? Again, CTV quotes sources suggesting the government promised “to go easy on him.” What on earth does that mean?
Whether it was within the rules or not, what we do know of this “gift” is that it relieves Duffy of having to pay any penalty for his actions. The senator has never acknowledged wrongdoing in this affair, neither in claiming expenses on his Ottawa residence as if it were a second home (he says the rules defining a senator’s primary residence were unclear) nor in claiming per diem expenses for Senate business while on holiday in Florida (he says a staffer mistakenly filed the claim). No one who is not actually in the pay of the government finds his explanations credible.
Yet the prime minister’s office claims Duffy showed “leadership” in arranging for Wright to repay his expenses, that indeed it was “the right thing to do.” Well, no. The right thing would have been not to file the false expense claims in the first place. The right thing, once they came to light, would have been to give the money back pronto, not stall for months and stonewall the auditors. The right thing would have been to decline Wright’s charity, or at the very least to have disclosed the payment publicly.
And, as it is now well established that he is not resident in the province he represents, in violation of the constitutional requirement to that effect, the right thing would be to resign.
Disclosure: I went to university with Wright, have sat on a charitable board with him, and consider him a friend, albeit at long distance: we have not spoken since he took the job, beyond the occasional brief email (for example, when my father died). Whether that informs or clouds my judgment of him I leave the reader to decide.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com\
Author: Andrew Coyne
No comments:
Post a Comment