The other night on television, Stephen Harper’s former communications manager, Geoff Norquay, said that since the RCMP has assured Nigel Wright he will not be charged, nobody cares about the whole stinking mess any longer.
Well, I do. As the saying goes, justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.
In order for that to happen in the case of Nigel Wright, we deserve a full explanation of how this decision was made — and who ultimately made it.
Did the lead investigator in this case, Cpl. Greg Horton, come to the conclusion that he did not have a case? If so, he should step forward and say so — and he also should say he was doing it of his own accord.
Perhaps Cpl. Horton did recommend charges and that recommendation was scotched by others higher up the chain. If that’s true, more questions need to be answered if the public is to maintain faith in the justice system.
What part, if any, did RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson play? He needs to tell the country. What part did the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions play, if any? And if a Crown prosecutor did decide that charges against Wright weren’t warranted, what was the legal reasoning?
Canadians already know from Cpl. Horton’s affidavit that the PMO assisted Senator Duffy by reimbursing him for improper expenses, softening a Senate Committee report on his expenses, and trying to influence an independent audit by Deloitte.
Did the DPP find errors in Cpl. Horton’s ITO that made the prosecutor’s office conclude the case should be dropped? If so, they should make those public. Or were the facts as sworn to by Cpl. Horton correct, but something else was lacking in his case?
Did a question of mens rea come into play here? An essential ingredient of any criminal offence is intent, or ‘guilty mind’. Usually, that doesn’t require separate proof. The normal test for mens rea is that a suspect did what the police accuse him of doing. There is no question about what Nigel Wright did in the Senate expense scandal. Has the reason why he did it now become the heart of the matter?
Wright has always offered a public-spirited explanation of his payment to Duffy — he claimed he didn’t want to leave taxpayers on the hook for the senator’s alleged expense improprieties. Did the DPP accept that explanation — and reject Cpl. Horton’s case — because there was no evidence of ‘guilty mind’?
If that’s true, Canadians need to hear the explanation so it can be measured against the known facts — which show that all of the benefits given to Duffy were arranged with great secrecy and confirmed by documents. As Paul Wells commented on television this week, if Wright’s motives were public-spirited, why didn’t he hold a press conference and tell the country about the admirable thing he’d done?
Prime Minister Stephen Harper also needs to make a clean breast of his hopelessly incoherent position on Nigel Wright. Does he still feel that Wright deceived him and acted alone, and was justifiably fired on that basis? Does he think that dropping the investigation ‘clears’ Wright? Will he hire him back?
Maybe he already has. It has been reported that Wright continued to do work for the PMO on trade deals after his dismissal. The prime minister should tell Canadians if that’s true. Then people can decide whether Harper was telling the truth when he said Wright’s deceptions disqualified him from working in the PMO — or whether it was all an elaborate charade.
Then there’s the question of what Justice Minister Peter MacKay ought to do next. Even though the RCMP investigation into Nigel Wright has been dropped, what about the Parliament of Canada Act? Under Section 16 of that statute, it is an indictable offence to give a senator compensation for services rendered with respect to “any claim, controversy, arrest, or other matter before the Senate”.
Will MacKay make any move to uphold the statute, or even look into whether there has been a breach? Surely no one can argue that the controversy of the Senate expense scandal wasn’t before the Senate. If MacKay thinks that Duffy paying back money he didn’t think he owed at the behest of the PM doesn’t rise to the provisions of the statute, he should say so.
Finally, there is Mike Duffy. The man who paid him $90,000 to stop talking to the media, and to go through the charade of pretending to pay his expenses with his own money, is off the hook. If Wright is no longer of interest to the RCMP, how can Duffy be on the matter of cash-for-silence? If Wright had only good intentions, what’s to say that Duffy didn’t too? No bribe-giving, no bribe-taking — just doing what his prime minister told him to do, even though he felt it was wrong.
The stakes are high here for all concerned. The hallmark of the Harper government is the impulse to politicize everything from science to the running of elections. Is justice being added to the list? There is a growing suspicion that the RCMP is now the prime minister’s police force.
During the 2011 election, RCMP officers assisted in the ejection of non-Harper supporters from a Conservative rally in London, Ontario. The unwanted attendees had posted pictures of themselves on Facebook attending a non-Conservative rally and had been spotted by organizers of the London event. The Mounties later admitted that tossing the students out “was not in accordance” with the RCMP’s mandate. But it was perfectly in keeping with the Harper Police mandate.
The RCMP also forced down a small plane flying over Ottawa and Gatineau with an anti-Harper sign. The sign was produced by the Public Service Alliance of Canada; 20,000 PSAC members had been slashed from the public payroll by the Harper government. The sign read, ‘Harper Hates Us.’
Vigilant Mounties on the ground ordered the plane to return to Rockcliffe Airport, where the pilot, Gian Ciambella, was told that his sign could be construed as hate speech. He was also told that the Mounties are responsible for the prime minister’s safety.
Despite a fanciful story that Ciambella had flown too close to Parliament, Transport Canada later confirmed that the pilot had never entered restricted airspace. The Harper Police had ordered down a Piper-Super-Cub flown by a pilot towing a sign to make his living — an anti-Harper sign.
Commissioner Paulson has contributed more than anyone to the fear that the RCMP are no longer independent of the Harper government. He sent an email to senior RCMP officers instructing them not to meet with MPs without prior approval from not only him but, remarkably, the minister of public safety.
Former public safety minister Vic Toews said that he needed to know “what the RCMP were saying and doing.” He also informed the Opposition that if they wanted to talk to the RCMP, they had to make the request through him. Paulson was being treated just like any other deputy minister in the Harper government — the real bosses are political.
Even more interesting than the question of who made the decision on Nigel Wright, and who will make it on Mike Duffy, is the matter of how the decision was arrived at. The negotiations that have been going on between the lawyers for both men and the Crown would give Canadians a pretty good idea of the state of our justice system.
Is it a partisan fish-market where all the goods smell faintly of too many hours in the sun, or that blindfolded lady holding the scales and sword?
Somehow, I don’t think Mary Dawson is the person to answer that question.
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