Since sashaying back from Calgary, the Harper government has been trying
to douse a five-alarm fire – the towering blaze of their credibility.Neither the PM’s stalag convention, nor his dalliance with black-clad zombie rock at the Cowboy Club, changed any channels. Not even Rob Ford’s psychotic fit in front of someone’s enterprising cellphone could do much to change the talk around town. As it had in the weeks leading up to the convention Duffygate awaited him back on Parliament Hill like an 800-pound gorilla.
The PM, who precious months ago insisted that there was no paper trail in this sordid game of political chicken, is now handing over his office’s non-existent documents to the RCMP. Where did they come from – the e-mail fairy?
Isn’t this the same PM who told the House of Commons there was no paper trail? In fact, the now politicized Privy Council Office insisted there was no paper either – not one piece after 23 separate access to information requests from various news outlets. It turns out the NDP’s Charlie Angus and CTV’s Robert Fife were right. Somebody was withholding information.
The paper trail was there all along, but the PMO wouldn’t give it up. This the PM calls “cooperating” with the RCMP. The Harper government showed the same level of cooperation with investigators from Elections Canada in the Robocalls investigation – negative drag, not assistance – and a judge noted it in the Council of Canadians case.
No matter. Duffy doesn’t just have a paper-trail: he has a 12-lane highway of paper which the RCMP will soon have in full – a nice bookend to the hundreds of pages of documents already supplied by Harper’s former Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright.
The difference between Harper’s idea of cooperation and Wright’s? Harper denied he had documents until he was formally and specifically asked for them. Wright contacted the RCMP and volunteered his information. So who is really cooperating?
And what exactly does it mean when the PM first said that “no one” in his office knew that Wright had given $90,000 to Duffy, and then changed that to “not many” knew? Did he mean not many of the cleaning staff?
What’s next: the Prime Minister was the only one in his own office, party and Senate majority who didn’t know?
Here is the pin he wriggles on if the public accepts his version of the story: when he said no one knew, he had obviously asked no one, lied about it, or everyone lied to the boss. His claim wasn’t about fact, it was about his incessant reflex to deny and control by choosing supportive versions of reality – supportive of his confabulations.
On February 11, Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy met for 50 minutes in room 204 in the PMO – from 12:07 PM until 12:54 PM. It’s the first of the fake repayment deal meetings. Duffy’s visit was initially redacted from the visitor log.
The next day David Tkachuck huddled in the same room with Wright for 20 minutes – from 1:41 PM until 2:05 PM. Tellingly, Tkachuck can’t remember if anyone else was present.
After Tkachuck left, it was the turn of the head of the Conservative Fund, Irving Gerstein, who also visited room 204 and stayed for two hours – from 2:24 PM to 4:28 PM. The visitors logs are silent on that meeting … oops, must have been an oversight. Gerstein claims he said no to the Duffy deal in no uncertain terms. Two hours is a long time to say no in no uncertain terms.
But we’re to believe that Harper did not know a thing about these crucial meetings taking place under his nose. Apparently, he is such a hands-off guy that he never even asks for a report of the meetings. Yes, and Lance Armstrong powered those bike rides in France with orange juice.
Which brings me to Nigel Wright, who’s not your typical body under the CPC caravan. Instead of settling back into his downy nest at Onex Corp after getting the axe, he puts in personal hours in an Ottawa soup kitchen. British cabinet minister John Profumo tried to scrub away the taint of the Christine Keeler/Mandy Rice-Davies Affair cleaning latrines in Toynbee Hall. It sounds like Wright too is seeking atonement. But for what?
Does Wright feel genuine guilt over allegedly going solo on Duffygate? Or, if you can accept the paradox, does he feel honour-bound to support the Prime Minister in a lie? If he does, he is alone in his beau geste. Stephen Harper feels zero compunction about throwing minions to the wolves – no matter how many mutually exclusive stories it takes to do it. Just ask Helena Guergis, Tom Flanagan or Bruce Carson.
Think about Harper’s “narratives”. First, it was full support for Wright and no resignation; that morphed into accepting his resignation with regret; next it was Wright did not resign but was sacked; and finally it was righteous indignation and a sense of betrayal that drove the PM to fire his rogue chief-of-staff.
So now we’re to believe that Wright was fired because he didn’t tell the PM about the Duffy deal? Well, the PM says he found out about the deal when the story broke in the media – May 14; and in case he went to bed early that night, certainly on May 15 – even with that hasty trip to Peru thrown in. That’s when he knew his trusted chief of staff had “deceived” him. Yet it took him until May 19 to dump the guy – and even then he does it “with great regret.” Flick this story with a fingernail and you will get no ring – it is glass, not crystal.
And if Wright got canned for not telling the PM about the $90 grand to Duffy, then why isn’t Senator Irving Gerstein now out looking for work? Gerstein knew about the improper deal. How else could he refuse to use party funds to pay Duffy’s alleged debts unless he knew exactly what he was refusing?
Even stranger, Gerstein confirmed at the Conservative convention on November 2 that the party paid Duffy’s legal bills – but mark you, only after Duffy had already released a copy of the bank draft. “Transparency”, Harper-style. Transparent when concealment is no longer possible.
Consider Gerstein’s exact words, “I made it absolutely clear to Nigel Wright that the Conservative Fund of Canada would not pay for Senator Duffy’s disputed expenses and never did.”
So Gerstein knew about Wright’s plan to pay Duffy’s expenses, but didn’t tell the PM – just like Wright. If the deal was so outrageous that a Senator was prepared to defy the PM’s chief of staff over something he wanted done, why didn’t he explain his rejection of Wright’s plan to Harper. The normal assumption would be if the PM’s chief of staff wanted it, the PM wanted it too.
In confirming that the Conservative Fund paid Duffy’s legal bills, Gerstein’s version of events raises much bigger problems for the Prime Minister.
On May 15th, 2013, Conservative party spokesman Fred DeLorey responded to Bob Fife’s revelation of the Duffy/Wright Affair by saying “no party money was involved.” Really?
Since the money to pay Duffy’s legal bill came from the Conservative Fund of Canada, the conclusion is inescapable: the Tory base, subsidized by taxpayers, were on the hook for $13,560, no matter how thickly the Party or the PMO spreads the fertilizer. The PMO tried to cover off this awkward fact by claiming that the legal fees in question were for legitimate expenses incurred during the Deloitte audit.
Puzzling. Mike Duffy didn’t participate in the audit. Instead, he says the PMO wrote him speaking lines for the media. So how could he rack up approximately 30 hours of high-priced legal bills for an audit he boycotted?
Duffy’s first lawyer, employment expert Janice Payne, billed Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton $13,560 on March 4, 2013 – nearly six weeks before the Deloitte audit was even presented to the Senate’s subcommittee on April 16, 2013.
It was not the audit that forced Duffy to hire an employment lawyer; it was the audit announcement on February 8, 2013. The legal bill was incurred to negotiate the deal that led to the $90,000 bank draft delivered to Duffy’s lawyer on March 25, 2013. That payment was supposed to make the audit unnecessary – an important objective for reasons as yet unknown.
By paying the legal bill on April 4, 2013, after Wright paid off Duffy, a persuasive argument could be made that the Party was accepting the deal. When you pay the other guy’s legal bill, it usually means someone has acknowledged that he’s right.
And then there is this fact to remember. Senator Pamela Wallin, now suspended, was audited and was a member of the Conservative caucus, just like Mike Duffy. Why didn’t Sen. Gerstein and the party pay her legal bills?
So it comes down to whether two people caught in the gears of this scandal subscribe to the same personal code as the PM; optics over reality.
One of them, Mike Duffy, has already signalled that he doesn’t. Whether you liked or didn’t like his Belly-Dance of innuendo that transfixed the Senate and the country, he did reveal new and explosive information. A little late in the day, and not necessarily for altruistic reasons, but better late than never.
And there may be more. Duffy’s criminal lawyer, Donald Bayne, said he has information germane to whether the PM knew about the Duffy deal that the media would find interesting. No lawyer of Bayne’s stature would make such a remark frivolously, whatever he may mean.
And then there is Duffy himself. This is a man who has recorded a few conversations in his time. I wonder if he recorded any in the month of February 2013? Does Duffy have a record of the Harper/Wright/Duffy meeting of February 13? After all, he quoted the PM’s exact words from their meeting after caucus. What was he quoting from? Memory?
After that meeting, Duffy went to PEI for a week, during which he had several discussions with Nigel Wright. Did he tape those calls? If he did, as well as calls from other colleagues, he may have proof for one of his most startling claims – that the prime minister himself would publicly confirm that Duffy was entitled to sit as a Senator from PEI if he did the deal.
As for Harper’s statement that his chief of staff acted alone, only flat-earthers, Edsel owners, and people who think global warming is caused by flatulent cattle can believe it now. In a February 20, 2013 email to Duffy’s lawyer, the PMO says they are ready to help Duffy handle the communications end of the deal.
“Chris Woodcock of his office and Patrick Rogers are communications specialists – very talented and happy to work with you to develop various strategies around communications,” Janice Payne wrote to her client.
Finally, there is the silent Nigel Wright, who returns to his comfy condo-for-one after a stint of penance in the soup kitchens of Ottawa. I hope he forgives me for saying it, but this is no longer politics; that quaint thing Anglicans call the soul is in play. If this matter comes to court, with Wright either as an accused or a witness, he will be sworn in and asked under oath what really happened.
Should that day come, he will either show the world the difference between himself and his former boss, or how much has been lost by his star-crossed detour into the penumbral regions of Harper politics.
They say Nigel Wright once considered going into the priesthood.
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