On the day the Conservative business establishment’s poster-boy, former Harper chief of staff Nigel Wright, took the stand in Senator Mike Duffy’s controversial corruption trial, the man who fired him (or said he did, at any rate) was on his way via Edmonton and B.C. to press the flesh among the polar bears.
You’ve got to hand it to Harper: he runs true to form, whether it’s to the Arctic, South America or the nearest closet. When CTV’s Bob Fife broke Duffygate, an alleged tale of tawdry payoffs and illicit expenses, Harper shuffled off on a foreign trip to avoid the heat in the kitchen back home.
Even by the low-to-non-existent standards of Harper’s paid liars, that trip — a meeting of the Pacific Alliance Leaders Summit in Cali, Colombia — was a farce. The truth? Harper really had no legitimate reason to waste all that fuel taking the Challenger south. He was simply going on the lam. Now he’s doing it again, following his favourite dictum: no comment, no story.
Unfair on my part to find fault, you say? Not really. Canada already had free trade agreements with all the participants — Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. There was no rational reason for Harper to go to Colombia. Just before leaving, he assembled his caucus and allowed the media in with the standard rules: pictures, but no questions.
This guy strips the content from everything. That’s why Global’s Tom Clark was marginalized and the correspondent for The Guardian dissed. Harper’s remark that Duffygate was a “distraction” that made him “angry” did not get rave reviews. As former Liberal finance minister Ralph Goodale put it at the time, the prime minister’s comments were “vacuous” and “tone deaf.” Which probably explains why Harper took off faster than Wyatt Earp when he heard Johnny Ringo was in town.
Why do I start with Stephen Harper on the day the media is turning itself inside-out over Nigel Wright’s testimony? Because Wright is one of the good ol’ boys who will almost certainly never do what some people — including the quaintly idealistic Conrad Black — suspect he might do: dish on Harper. When a witness at a criminal trial shows up with his lawyer, you know that the choreography and the coaching has been Big League. Nigel will be taking a lot of pitches and not making many swings.
What does that mean? Just this: Wright will defend both his class and his party. His class is Bay Street, his party is the boys in blue. He will do nothing heroic on behalf of the Canadian people, and he will do nothing to damage the prime minister for whom he once worked as a “wheel dog” — a coinage Stephen King fans will recognize.
That’s why on Day One of what could turn into a marathon stint on the stand, Wright revealed little more than his reflexive generosity as a public servant. The rich and well-connected have a way of turning everything they do into a virtue. Even their philanthropy is strategic. It remains to be seen how Wright’s philanthropy can be Duffy’s criminal act.
Wright not only reached into his own pocket to give Mike Duffy a $90,000 gift for the apparent good of the taxpayers, he also bought a lot of doughnuts for the staff that he didn’t claim as expenses. Doughnut philanthropy to go along with his Good Samaritan payoff to Duffy — not exactly a Van Gogh self-portrait, but coming from a silver-spooner from Bay Street, not surprising.
That is not to say Wright couldn’t end up changing the course of the trial, and perhaps the election, by admitting something that I think Duffy’s lawyer, the redoubtable Donald Bayne, will push for. It should never be forgotten that Harper skewered Wright through the only thing that matters to members of the Masters-of-the-Universe set — the ego.
Although Harper has backed away from it in recent months, the PM publicly accused Wright of deceiving him. That, you’ll remember, was the reason offered up by Harper for firing Wright — that he was not fit to serve in the PMO.
Now, once you get through laughing yourself sick over that observation, here’s another point to consider. What would happen if Bayne got Wright to admit that Duffy’s crime was not against the Criminal Code, but against the gospel according to Harper — the one that says, “Thou Shalt not Violate the Commandment of Political Perception”?
Remember, Wright told the RCMP as much — intimating that he needed to know if the PM was “good to go” with fitting Duffy out with cement boots for the crime of offending the values of the Conservative party base. Wright was surprised that Duffy was even charged, and in fact never believed he had broken the law on housing expenses. What does that tell us about Stephen Harper?
The question of whether Canadians will see justice in this case depends on the latitude the judge permits Bayne. If it’s a lot, we could actually get to the bottom of this debacle. If it’s a little, it could turn into another Michael Sona trial.
The truth is that Wright doesn’t have the final word on whether or not Duffy’s trial will end in justice. Before anyone can get to the bottom of Duffygate, the guy hiding out in the Arctic needs to clap his hand on the Bible and spill what he knows in a courtroom setting where the penalty for lying is a charge of perjury.
If we want to know what Stephen Harper knew, we’ll have to ask the man himself — not the organ grinder’s monkey.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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