Nigel Wright, Stephen Harper's Ex-Chief Of Staff, Broke Ethics Rules In Duffy Scandal: Watchdog

OTTAWA — Former prime minister Stephen Harper's one-time chief of staff was never prosecuted for his role in Mike Duffy's Senate expenses fiasco but now Nigel Wright is getting a belated slap on the wrist from the federal ethics watchdog.

In a long-awaited report released Thursday, ethics commissioner Mary Dawson says Wright broke both the Parliament of Canada Act and the Conflict of Interest Act when he personally gave Duffy $90,000 to repay the Senate for questionable living expense claims.

The Duffy coda: The hypocrites hit back

The Harper Conservatives never did have much for use for judges who didn’t see things their way. We can now add Justice Charles Vaillancourt’s name to the list.

Remember Stephen Harper’s attack on Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin — the one that had her squirmin’ in her ermine? And then there was Dean Del Mastro’s assertion that his guilty verdict on four counts of electoral fraud was only Judge Lisa Cameron’s “opinion.”

Beating a dead horse: Why can’t Senate Conservatives let the Duffy affair go?

Despite a few grim similarities — the presumption of guilt, the trial by social media — the Mike Duffy affair is not Fifty Shades of Ghomeshi.

It’s as black and white as it gets — though you’d never know that from the course events have taken since the senator’s celebrity trial ended.

Ripley’s Believe it or Not might take an interest in in Sen. Leo Housakos and his ill-considered attempt to add double jeopardy to the Senate’s list of ongoing, abject failings.

Duffy, Harper and the census — and the terrible price of paranoia

Only a nation of geeks could trigger the crash of a census website. That, at least, is what a lot of people seemed to assume after the StatsCan site flatlined on Monday.

Sure, we may be geeks … but apparently we’re trusting geeks, too. On Monday — which just happened to be the deadline for filing our annual tax returns — many Canadians were still keen to give the government even more information about themselves, overwhelming the StatsCan website with their replies to the 2016 census. “Here are all my receipts. Want my diary, too?”

A lot of people seem determined to learn nothing from the Duffy affair

Who’s writing the script for the post-Duffygate coverage? Franz Kafka?

A significant part of the Canadian Establishment is not only blaming a victim — it’s blaming an exonerated victim. Some want even more punishment for a man the courts decided deserved no punishment at all.

RCMP brass have buried themselves head-first in the sands of denial. RCMP Assistant Commissioner Gilles Michaud actually wrote congratulatory letters to the investigators who worked on the Duffy case and helped come up with the 31 charges against him.

The Duffy affair — and what it’s like living under the PMO’s bootheel

I suppose it’s tempting to view the Mike Duffy saga as a zero-sum game — one where the losses balance out the wins. In fact, nobody won this time.

Duffy himself certainly didn’t ‘win’ — not entirely. Contrary to what you may have read on this page and elsewhere, Duffy was neither vindicated nor exonerated. “Not guilty” and “innocent” are still two very different things.

Time to flush out the truth in the Duffy investigation

They cut off the wrong leg, mixed up the babies, confused the medications, screwed up the blood types and didn’t much like the patient.

If RCMP investigators and ministry of the attorney general’s lawyers had been doctors, they would have been facing a malpractice suit over Duffygate.

When will someone call for an investigation into this institutional witch-hunt in which a legal calamity was only avoided thanks to a crusading and indefatigable lawyer and a clear-eyed and fearless judge?

After Duffy, there’s nothing left of Harper’s legacy but ashes

Mike Duffy wasn’t just acquitted — he was vindicated. And almost exactly to the degree he was vindicated in court, the Conservative leadership in the Senate was excoriated and the former PMO eviscerated in the scathing verdict of Ontario Justice Charles Vaillancourt.

While Duffy was acquitted of 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery, Stephen Harper and his former PMO were convicted in absentia of abuse of power.

After Duffy, a question: Who owns our justice system?

“Senator Duffy, in the last two to three years,” said Duffy’s lawyer Donald Bayne Thursday afternoon, “has been subjected to more public humiliation than any other Canadian in history.”

Justice Charles Vaillancourt described that ordeal in more acid terms: “Damage control at its finest,” administered with “ruthless efficiency,” he called it. “The political, covert, relentless unfolding of events is mindboggling and shocking. The precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud.”

Duffy found not guilty on ALL charges -- but Harper does not look good

UPDATE: Justice Charles Vaillancourt has found Senator Mike Duffy not guilty on all charges, starting with the key one of fraudulently claiming his cottage in Prince Edward Island as his principal residence.

The judge ruled that he believed Duffy when the latter said he honestly tried to follow the rules as he understood them -- and as the Senate's leadership and the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) had explained them to him.

Mike Duffy’s sad, shabby show trial is ending with a whimper

For months, Mike Duffy sat in Courtroom 33 like Buddha with his poker face on. A slightly pink Buddha, somewhat diminished from the days when he winked at his fans on TV.

Today, on his last day testifying in his own defence, some flashes of the man inside showed through the mask of the seasoned performer. It has been a brutal, battering exercise in what Duffy has described as a public shaming for having lived by the rules of a very dysfunctional institution. The Crown and the Mounties see it differently. Now all that matters is how Mr. Justice Charles Vaillancourt sees it.

Wright-Duffy affair must be cautionary tale for Trudeau’s Liberals

When at the age of 80, Nigel Wright lies between his Frette sheets, his bespoke suits long gone to Goodwill, I often wonder whether he will believe he served the Lord, or the Dark Lord, in his brief stint in public service?

With the criminal trial of Mike Duffy set to resume, the curious and controversial role that Wright played in this soap opera of trough politics and shady payoffs is worth reconsidering. A new PMO is in the process of being cobbled together and the Harper operation offers a cautionary tale of how not to do it.

Harper dodges questions on Senator Irving Gerstein’s role in Duffy Senate expense scandal

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper on Tuesday avoided answering questions about Conservative Senator Irving Gerstein’s possible role in attempts by the PMO to minimize scrutiny of Senator Mike Duffy’s expenses, which are now the subject of criminal charges.

When Harper was asked on the campaign trail if he views Gerstein’s involvement in the Duffy affair as improper or a betrayal of his trust, as Harper has deemed Nigel Wright’s actions to be, he avoided the question.

Novak: 'I did not know that Mr. Wright was going to cut that cheque'

The prime minister’s chief of staff Ray Novak says he did not know that his predecessor, Nigel Wright, was going to give Mike Duffy a personal cheque for $90,000 to repay questionable Senate expenses.

CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife spoke Friday morning with Novak, who has been out of the public eye for more than a week. Fife caught up with the PM’s aide as he made his way to the Conservative campaign office, and asked him whether he knew about the $90,000.

Duffy trial takeaway: The PMO as rogue operation

It may not be Rumpole of the Bailey, but the Perils of the Puffster are making one thing crystal clear: Stephen Harper has become a law unto himself.

The evidence from the near past is damning enough: Found in contempt of Parliament; breaking his own elections law; sending unconstitutional legislation to the Supreme Court; passing retroactive laws to make the illegal legal; publicly attacking the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; forcing out Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commissioner for following the statute governing her agency; dumping the Parliamentary Budget Officer for correcting the government’s false program costings; usurping some of the constitutional functions of the Governor-General; and passing legislation to punish political enemies such as unions and environmentalists.

To recap, the prime minister is not responsible for almost anything

To recap, the prime minister is not responsible. He is not responsible for appointing Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau to the Senate. He is not responsible for appointing senators from provinces in which they were not resident, and he is not responsible for their subsequent activities shilling for the Tories across the country at public expense.

And he is most certainly not responsible for the clandestine campaign, involving officials in his office, the chairman of the Conservative Fund Canada, and several leading Conservative senators, to repay Senator Duffy’s falsely claimed expenses on his behalf and conceal his misdeeds from the public. He is not responsible for his spokesman’s statements, even after the plot had been exposed, praising Mr. Duffy for “doing the right thing” and vouching confidence in his chief of staff, Nigel Wright.

Have the Mounties become Harper’s private police force?

Are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turning into Dudley DoWrong?

You remember, of course, Dudley DoRight. He was the cartoon Mountie with the Mulroney-esque jaw, arch-enemy of the villainous Snidely Whiplash. Snidely made his living tying damsels in distress to railway tracks; Dudley made his by whisking them away just before the onrushing train turned them into Cubist art.

Court documents ‘validate’ allegations of PMO involvement in committee business: Rathgeber

The emails and memos entered as evidence in Sen. Mike Duffy’s criminal trial speak to what’s become “the new normal” in the Prime Minister’s Office of interfering with Parliamentary business, says Conservative-turned-Independent MP Brent Rathgeber.

 Mr. Rathgeber didn’t know it then but around the same time that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office was working to clean up the mess around improper expense claims in spring 2013, staffers also began their “battle of wills” with the then-dissenting Conservative MP over whitewashing his private member’s bill on public service salary disclosure.

Duffy Developments Put Tories In Damage Control Mode

OTTAWA — The week began with Conservative operatives whisking their party's former Senate leader away from inquisitive reporters — and it never got much better.

As each day of testimony from the Mike Duffy trial traced a tighter and tighter loop around Stephen Harper's inner circle, the mood on the Conservative campaign bus grew ever frostier.

Benjamin Perrin, ex-PMO lawyer, believed Harper OK'd details of plan to repay Duffy's expenses

A former legal adviser of the Prime Minister's Office wrapped up his testimony today, saying he believed Stephen Harper had directly approved the details of a plan by members of his staff to pay back Mike Duffy's living expenses.

Benjamin Perrin, who is testifying for a second day at the senator's trial in Ottawa, referred to an email in which Harper's then chief of staff Nigel Wright wrote "we are good to go from the PM."