As spectacle, it hasn’t exactly been Ben Hur. Three distinct camps have emerged.
There are the people who think it’s all about a bad apple — the once-portly, now much-diminished senator from Prince Edward Island. This group thinks justice amounts to turning the bad apple into applesauce. They read Christie Blatchford and laugh uproariously with every pass of the razor.
What they tend to forget is that statistics from the Red Chamber show that Duffy was 23rd on the list of Senate spenders. So the lone bad apple theory is dubious — and may become completely untenable after the Senate releases the Auditor General’s much-awaited report on senators’ expenses over the next week or so.
According to the CBC, the news is bad — and embarrassing. The entire Senate leadership will be asked to repay inappropriate expenses — including Senate Speaker Leo Housakos, Senate government house leader Claude Carignan and Senate Opposition leader James Cowan. And all three men happen to sit on the subcommittee handling the Senate’s response to the AG’s audit.
There are those who think Duffy’s trial is all about the Red Chamber, and that the former TV star is merely a scapegoat — the Old Duff as the Michael Sona of the Senate expenses scandal. They also sense that Stephen Harper is trying to destroy the institution, senator by senator, because the Supreme Court ruled that he could not reform or abolish it unilaterally. Feeding senators to the lions, while not very Christian, provides much-needed red meat to Harper’s base.
And then there are those who would rather run ten miles through a bog than listen to another Byzantine legal argument. What they wanted was an episode of Law and Order. When they got was CPAC on a slow day at the public accounts committee. This group now doesn’t read anyone. The time they used to invest in following the trial they currently devote to the Weather Channel and that great American tradition, the Stanley Cup Finals.
As of yesterday, there is also a fourth group — observers who think that Duffy’s legal odyssey has lost its water-cooler appeal as hot news. That’s because this wheezing calliope of justice delayed will not come to a halt, let alone be decided, until after the federal election — probably not until Christmas. For this group, the sub-plot of the Duffy trial has always been more important than the principle attraction. They now think it’s a non-factor in the election.
Which might turn out to be true — especially if the Crown continues to turn away from the deep and obvious political aspects of the Duffy affair to concentrate on the moralizing mouse droppings it has offered so far — such as illicit dog-buying trips where no dog was bought, and most recently, unauthorized attendance at funerals that are at least arguably allowed under the rules.
The judge has heard testimony from Senate Finance Director Nicole Proulx and other Senate experts to the effect a senator can travel “home” at any time without supplying a reason. So how can unauthorized funeral-attending, at least in P.E.I., be a crime? I’d like to see the arguments for mens rea on that one.
When will the Crown get its briefs in gear and begin calling witnesses like the three senators who know exactly how the PMO acted as the grand puppet-master in the entire expenses scandal? Prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to substitute common sense for Senate rules in the first phase of the trial. They belly-flopped. Is that why they’re now ragging the puck with less-than-epical witnesses and half-day sessions?
Nigel Wright, of course, will cut to the heart of the matter whenever he shows up: exactly what the PM knew about the two deals to pay off Duffy’s bills, and when he knew it.
But it also would be in the public’s interest to hear from senators Marjory LeBreton, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen and David Tkachuck. There is already ample documented evidence of the intimate roles they played in how the Duffy/Wright affair was directed from start to finish from the PMO, including approval from Prime Minister Harper.
Given the prosecution’s attempt to keep certain potentially pertinent materials out of the trial, one wonders if they’ll even call these senators. According to published reports, Senator Dan Lang was on the Crown’s witness list, but apparently will not be called. There may be a good reason; so far, no reason has been offered.
The elephant in the hall (it will never be permitted into the room) is that some of the very things that Senator Duffy is being accused of have been standard practice for the Harper government for a long time.
Back in 2008, for example, then-minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Rona Ambrose went to Whitehorse to announce millions in mining training for aboriginals. But she was also the star attraction at a Conservative fundraising event at the Mountain View Golf Course that had been scheduled for weeks before the official business. Bottom line? Taxpayers subsidized CPC fundraising — period.
And they continue to do it, as evidenced by the track record of that Energizer Bunny of partisan politics, Jason Kenney. Back in 2014, when he was Employment minister, Kenney went on a coast-to-coast-to-coast road trip to advance “the skills shortage agenda” of the Harper government. By day, he was busy with his official duties, but by night he mixed duty with fundraising like rum and Coke. Guess who paid the freight for the partisan stuff?
I know. Everybody does it, right? Just like the Senate.
Here’s what is essentially phoney about the entire Mike Duffy prosecution: It’s not about cleaning up government. If the Harper government were serious about cleaning up government, it wouldn’t unleash the power of the PMO on a single individual for reasons that seem to have little to do with Senate rules (such as they are), and much more to do with political vindictiveness and advantage.
Instead, it would allow a systemic audit of the government by the auditor-general’s office to find things that would never be picked up in a mere transactional audit. Sheila Fraser asked the Harper government to conduct a systemic audit across government, but was refused. If the PM’s in a lather to scrub everyone clean with a bar of Ivory Snow, then he should order an audit of the expenses of MPs, as Postmedia’s Stephen Maher recently argued.
Of course, Harper is not big on getting to the bottom of things, especially his own messes. Despite repeated requests, he refused to call a public inquiry into robocalls — which remains a serious unsolved crime.
He didn’t call a public inquiry into the thousands of missing and murdered native women, though First Nations peoples and the Canadian people are demanding it.
He didn’t call a public inquiry into the shootings on Parliament Hill, though recently released reports show that many serious questions need to be answered before this government hands over Hill security to the Mounties who failed to get the job done that tragic day.
So it’s not remarkable that Stephen Harper has no interest in seeing parliamentarians scrutinized on their expenses; he and his colleagues are too busy helping themselves to public funds to advance the partisan agenda of the government and the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s doubtful that the government’s advertising spending — taxpayer-funded and largely partisan — could stand the test of an independent audit.
Chances are that Harper remembers what happened in the United Kingdom when parliamentarians failed in their many attempts to block freedom of information requests seeking to shed light on their expenses. Those MP called requests for the release of public information “unlawful intrusions” — much as the Senate described attempts by Duffy’s defence to table reports paid for by the public and relevant to his trial.
Eventually, someone leaked a full, uncensored document of British MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph. It showed that the House of Commons was full of scallywags. Pandemonium broke out, there were mass resignations and people went to prison for false accounting. It was a stunning example of what happens when you allow public institutions to operate in secret above the essential need for accountability.
In the U.K., they used their expenses scandal to reform the whole parliamentary system. Here, the PM and his minions merely arranged for the public flogging of an alleged miscreant — even though the truth is they knew there was a good chance his most notable expenses were in order.
Then again, what’s truth got to do with it?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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