But it is not just the man who went from media icon, to politics, to a hot-air balloon of alleged corruption who has a vested interest in the outcome of this long-awaited trial.
For the first time since this circus began back in 2013, PMO staffers will not have the option of offering ‘scenarios’ — the lovely euphemism to describe the oft-fictitious claims of their boss. They will take the stand under oath. This time around it’s truth or consequences – the consequences being perjury.
The questioning will be direct and unavoidable — the opposite of Question Period, and those exercises in stand-up comedy that go by the name of “press conference” in the Harper era. For the collection of PMO staffers who offer evidence against Duffy, it will be a new experience to deal with a grand inquisitor like Donald Bayne. Bayne, the accused’s lawyer, is not a member of the press who can be put off with a load of pre-fabricated flapdoodle from the Langevin Block. He is a detail man who is relentless, and who knows the criminal law and how to get answers to his questions.
More importantly, he has a wagonload of emails between his client and the PMO, as well as other evidence, to direct that razor-sharp mind of his. Bayne is someone who demands your “A” game. People like Benjamin Perrin, the PM’s former legal advisor, and Ray Novak, his current chief of staff, had better bring theirs.
Everyone now knows that the PMO is already deeply compromised in this matter. The prime minister himself completely misled the country when he said that only Nigel Wright and Duffy knew about the secret $90,000 “gift”. He couldn’t have made a single inquiry before going out on that limb of misinformation.
It’s clear that at least a dozen people in his office were aware of the situation. If you count senior members of the Conservative Party, certain senators, and CPC lawyer Arthur Hamilton, many more knew what was coming down – and why it was coming down — than Harper had tried to tell Canadians, inaccurately.
Bayne has already said that he has evidence pertinent to the issue of what the PM knew about the arrangement and when he knew it that the press would find interesting. He has also declared that in the end, after a fair hearing, his client will be found not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing.
Is the Senate a flawless institution? Of course not. Could Mike Duffy still find himself on the sticky end of a legal judgment? Yes. But did the Senate’s rules allow Duffy to do what he did, whether or not Canadians like it? Was the $90,000 repayment of allegedly improper expenses the brainchild of the PMO devised for purely political reasons? The beginning of wisdom is the suspension of judgment.
The most critical witness from the PMO of the day will be Nigel Wright, the PM’s former chief-of-staff. Wright is a titan compared to the many political hacks who will testify against Duffy. He is also a gifted negotiator and a lawyer.
And Wright is something else that Stephen Harper probably doesn’t understand. Though deeply loyal to the Conservative party, he will not lie for the prime minister. According to the people who know him best, Wright is a deeply religious man who will answer truthfully any question put to him under oath.
There are two potentially devastating questions that the whiz kid from Bay Street is almost sure to be asked. One of them is obvious. What did the “good to go from the PM” email mean? If it means what even recent speakers of the English language would be entitled to conclude, it means that Stephen Harper approved the deal he later pretended to know nothing about. It would be Harper’s Richard Nixon moment: the leader of the country caught out knowingly and deliberately misleading the nation.
But there is at least one other question that could have serious consequences for this prime minister. Did Harper or did he not fire Wright, as he claimed on a Halifax radio show weeks after CTV’s Bob Fife broke the story of “Duffygate”?
It remains one of the mysteries of this scandal. Initially, the prime minister said that Wright continued to enjoy his “full confidence” after the $90,000 gift from his chief of staff to Duffy became public. There would be no resignation.
A few days after that, Harper “reluctantly” accepted Wright’s decision to go. A few weeks later, Harper claimed that Wright had been “dismissed” for concluding a deal that the PM would never have approved had he known about it, and which was concealed from him. Wright made the trip from well-meaning Good Samaritan to ethical failure at warp speed in Harper’s shifting accounts of what went on inside the Langevin Block.
The simple question is this: were the PM’s changing stories the truth as he became aware of it or merely revealed out of political necessity?
Whatever it is, this is not misspeaking. If in fact, Wright was not fired but resigned, this is lying.
When the PM came up with the firing story on that radio show, Wright’s lawyers responded with a chilling comment. They had nothing to say “at this time” about the prime minister’s latest version of events.
A man who knows Harper better than most, Preston Manning, made clear where he stood on the puzzling affair. At the end of the day, Wright’s version of events would prove to be true — a view tacitly endorsed by cabinet ministers Peter MacKay and Jason Kenney. Wright was not the dishonest fixer, but a true Conservative full of integrity.
And what about the RCMP? Will the treasure trove of emails held by Donald Bayne inform Canadians how the Force conducted this investigation? Did its detectives look for exculpatory evidence or, as the PMO put it recently, was their investigation “against” rather than “into” Mike Duffy?
After all, this prime minister has set the RCMP on members of his own party in the past – including former CPC MP Bill Casey, and former cabinet minister Helena Guergis. In both cases, the Mounties found nothing, but Harper’s victims were both expelled from the caucus.
Canadians still don’t know why Senator Duffy is charged with accepting a bribe in the matter of the $90,000 gift to settle expenses, while the man who gave it to him, Nigel Wright, is not facing charges for being on the other end of said bribe. Was the arrangement legal because the PM approved it? The Commissioner of the RCMP has promised an answer to that overwhelming question but so far has not delivered it.
Finally, there is the media. On the basis of untested evidence, Duffy’s reputation has been shattered to shards. The question facing the press corps is whether they have succumbed to the PMO’s sleaze campaign against Duffy, well-founded or not. Instead of being clothed in the presumption of innocence, Duffy has been clothes-lined by a PMO-friendly press.
To most Canadians, Duffy is already presumed guilty. The trial seems to be something of an afterthought.
In a few months time, Canadians will have to decide, politically speaking, who’s their daddy — or mama, taking into account the indefatigable Elizabeth May. The Duffy trial could show us something about the character of the current prime minister, and could determine if Harper will need a moving van next October.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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