CTV reported Monday that Nigel Wright, who has since resigned his post as Mr. Harper’s top aide, consulted two Conservative senators while hatching the deal that would see him write a May 15 cheque to Mr. Duffy to, in effect, cover the $90,000 in housing expenses Mr. Duffy repaid.
The two senators consulted by Mr. Wright, according to CTV, were Carolyn Stewart Olsen, who was once the Prime Minister’s press secretary, and David Tkachuk. Both sat on the committee overseeing the audit into Mr. Duffy’s expenses. The CTV report suggested Mr. Wright enlisted the two to help convince Mr. Duffy to go along with the pact.
Ms. Stewart Olsen denies the CTV report, saying she spoke with Mr. Wright often in the course of her duties, but was never told about any repayment plan. “I deny that I knew anything about Nigel Wright paying Mike Duffy $90,000,” Ms. Stewart Olsen told The Globe Tuesday. Mr. Tkachuk has also said that he spoke with Mr. Wright, but didn’t know about the deal to write a cheque to Mr. Duffy.
Mr. Harper’s former communications director, Angelo Persichilli, has also said he called Mr. Duffy “as a friend” to urge him to repay his expense claims, though he insists he knew nothing about the deal with Mr. Wright.
The questions come after Mr. Harper has sought to distance himself from the Duffy ordeal by saying Mr. Wright acted alone in writing a cheque to the Conservative-appointed senator and former broadcaster. “Those were his decisions. They were not communicated to me or to members of my office. They were Mr. Wright’s decisions, but he takes full responsibility for them,” Mr. Harper said during Question Period on June 5. In one press conference, he added that he was “not consulted. I was not asked to sign off on any such thing and had I obviously been consulted or known, I would not have agreed with it.”
Mr. Duffy was a stalwart of the campaign trail and the speaking circuit for the Conservative Party, but now sits as an independent.
The CTV report, citing emails it did not publish, said Mr. Duffy was at first hesitant to go along with a deal to accept a cheque from Mr. Wright, but that Mr. Tkachuk threatened him with losing his Senate seat. Mr. Tkachuk noted that Mr. Duffy may not meet the residency requirements to be a senator, but offered to look past that if the expense claims were repaid, according to the CTV report.
Through his office, Mr. Tkachuk said Tuesday the “conversation in question never took place” and is “a complete fabrication.” His office said Mr. Tkachuk is out of the country and not doing interviews.
Ms. Stewart Olsen echoed that Tuesday.
“It’s a political organization. You talk to your chief of staff. He figures out, you know, just getting an update on what’s going on. So yes, we would do that, but certainly not about any method of him offering to repay the money and all of that. For sure, no. I knew nothing about that,” she said.
Mr. Persichilli, Mr. Harper’s former communications director, called Mr. Duffy urging him to pay back the money, but said he did so “as a friend, 200 per cent.” He was not serving as director of communications at the time.
“I didn’t know anything about the deal. I said if you misunderstood what was there [in the rules], pay the money back. And that was all. That was all. I didn’t talk to anyone,” Mr. Persichilli said in an interview Tuesday.
Mr. Tkachuk and Ms. Stewart Olsen had previously been revealed to have softened the language of the Senate report about Mr. Duffy’s expenses, with a draft version containing passages that would have cast Mr. Duffy in a more negative light. They have said they made that decision on their own, after the money had already been paid back. Ms. Stewart Olsen said Senate draft reports are regularly edited, and noted the Deloitte audit’s language was never tampered with.
Original Article
Source: theglobeandmail.com/
Author: Josh Wingrove
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