But the case of a senator’s duplicity in the handling of his living expenses now reaches deeply into the prime minister’s office. As such, it could prove more punitive than imagined.
We learned yesterday that the senator from Prince Edward Island received a $90,000 handout from the prime minister’s wealthy chief of staff, Nigel Wright, to compensate the government for improperly claimed living expenses.
You might recall this secret bailout is coming from a Conservative party that has publicly prioritized accountability and Senate reform.
What is curious right off the top here is that we are asked to believe that Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one of the most hands-on PMs ever, didn’t know about this.
Is that credible? On a high-profile controversy, the PM’s right-hand man slips the senator a cool $90,000 and doesn’t tell the boss? He leaves Harper in the dark when there are serious questions involving the Senate Conflict of Interest Code — and grounds to conclude the handout may well have violated it?
Would any chief of staff want to enter into that kind of possible breach without informing the prime minister? The code requires senators to disclose all gifts over $500 within 30 days. This, by all appearances, was not done. The code says further that a senator cannot accept any gift or benefit “that could reasonably be considered to relate to the senator’s position.” The one exception, the code says, is if the gift is an expression of courtesy or protocol, or within the standards of hospitality.
The latter clause would not seem to apply. Nigel Wright is a smart man, an old friend of Duffy’s. You would think, given the political sensitivities, he surely would have apprised himself of what the code says before reaching that deeply into his bank account.
So what are we to believe? Here’s what it looks like: The prime minister and his chief of staff thought, “Well, this is dicey but the media won’t find out. The story won’t get out. We’ll be okay.” But of course the media — CTV, to be specific — did find out. They got caught.
They could have been up front about this. Duffy didn’t have the money, despite his hefty ($132,000) senate salary, to reimburse taxpayers. He could have announced he would have to borrow it. Wright could have said in forwarding the money that, as a friend, he wanted to help out Duffy. It would have looked better than it does now.
These guys are experienced pros. Questions of character and morality haunt this government, going all the way back to the in-and-out controversy — which they also figured wouldn’t come back to them. There’s been that and much, much more. Why would they add another?
Prime Minister Harper has a habit of digging in deep to defend his own. He could have cut Duffy loose and avoided all these problems when the news first broke about the illegitimate expense claims. But Duffy has been a favourite of the PM’s. He was viewed as having done the Conservatives a great favour in the 2008 election. At the end of the campaign, when momentum could have tilted either way, Liberal leader Stephane Dion stumbled in responding to a CTV question he couldn’t understand. The CTV reporter promised Dion he wouldn’t run the clip — but Duffy turned around and made a major story of it. The Conservatives later acknowledged it really swung votes their way in the final days. It wasn’t much later that Duffy was named a senator.
Any help he provided them then is being made up for now — and it’s ironic that CTV is leading the way on the story.
The PMO likely will try some legal hair-splitting and argue that the ethics code has not been broken. It will want to do this all the moreso because the story now heavily implicates Nigel Wright. The ethics watchdog, Democracy Watch, weighed in yesterday, saying that in its opinion the code was violated.
It’s been another tough month in Harperland. There’s the case of the $3.1 billion in anti-terrorism funding that can’t be traced. There’s the matter of the PMO support for Peter Penshue, despite his spending violations, and the message sent to Harper on this in the by-election. Some of his Harper’s own MPs have split from his diktat and are refusing to send out the party’s sleazy attack pamphlets against Justin Trudeau.
And we shouldn’t forget Conservative House leader Peter Van Loan on the Duffy case. The senator showed “leadership” in his handling of the repayment, Van Loan opined.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Lawrence Martin
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