Now the opposition parties are boosting calls for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to produce Nigel Wright’s “personal cheque” to prove no government funds were used to defray Sen. Mike Duffy’s inappropriately claimed expenses.
“There’s an easy way to fix this,” said NDP leader Tom Mulcair Friday. “Show us the cheque.”
In 2001, it barely quelled the uproar when Chrétien produced a napkin scrawled with his name to show he’d sold his interest in a hotel next to Shawinigan’s Grand-Mere golf resort. The opposition raged he was in a conflict when he lobbied for a federal business loan to the new hotel owner.
Paulson’s cheque, released under Access to Information, was proof he had paid after-the-fact when the Globe and Mail reported he had used on-duty Mounties as his wedding honour guard.
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But so far, the Conservative government isn’t budging.
Harper said categorically no prime minister’s office funds were used when Wright, Harper’s former PMO chief of staff, wrote a $90,000 cheque to Duffy to reimburse taxpayers for money he wasn’t entitled to claim in the first place.
The facts, said Harper on Thursday, are not very good but clear: “Mr. Wright wrote a cheque on his own personal account and gave it to Mr. Duffy so he could repay his expenses and told me about it on May 15.”
However, it’s not clear when the Wright cheque was dated or exactly what account it was drawn on. The prime minister says it was a “gift” to Duffy to spare taxpayers a hit — though neither Duffy nor Wright seems to have declared it in timely fashion as required under ethics guidelines for their respective offices.
“Canadians still haven’t seen the cheque. There is an easy way to fix this. Show us the cheque. We’ll see the date, we’ll find out if it was a trust account, we’ll find out if it really was personal funds,” Mulcair told a news conference.
To further complicate matters for Harper and the government, the CBC reported this week that Wright had sole signing authority in the PMO on a Conservative party fund.
The party says there is no connection between party funds and Wright’s gesture.
The prime minister was not in the Commons on Friday, but his chief spokesman Andrew MacDougall, parliamentary secretary Pierre Poilievre, and Conservative Party of Canada spokesman Fred DeLorey all defended party cash as a legitimate way for the prime minister to cover the costs of partisan-related activity. They said all other parties do the same.
“There would be a scandal if we did otherwise. If we tried to put those costs on the backs of taxpayers, that would be wrong,” Poilievre said.
Still, it’s raised a whole new series of questions.
Nathan Rotman, national director of the New Democratic Party, wrote to the Commissioner of Elections Canada on Friday calling for an investigation into what the CBC called a “secret fund” known only to a few in the PMO:
“The NDP believes that the reports of this fund bring up serious questions with regard to the Conservative Party’s compliance with the elections act, in particular, whether this fund was being reported along with the other revenues and expenses of the Chief Agent of the party. As such, we question the very legitimacy of the creation and operation of the fund.”
The letter set out five key questions about the fund, including how transfers of funds are reported and whether the existence of any so-called “separate fund” violates the Elections Act.
The use of party funds to cover partisan or political expenses of governing leaders is neither illegal nor new: as prime minister, Pierre Trudeau got an indoor pool; Clyde Wells got a $50,000 salary top-up after leaving law to lead the Newfoundland Liberals until he became premier. Brian Mulroney’s former chief of staff Norman Spector has written about how he covered expenses of former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s wife Mila, who had “an expensive lifestyle.”
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Tonda MacCharles
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