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POLITICS BRIEFING
By Chris Hannay (@channay)
Senator Mike Duffy has been acquitted of all charges, though as many commentators point out (see below), Justice Charles Vaillancourt of the Ontario Court of Justice was particularly unimpressed with how Stephen Harper's office handled the whole issue. For the record, here is what the judge wrote, in a section he called "Peering through the looking glass":
"The email traffic that has been produced at this trial causes me to pause and ask myself, 'Did I actually have the opportunity to see the inner workings of the PMO [Prime Minister's Office]?' "Was Nigel Wright actually ordering senior members of the Senate around as if they were mere pawns on a chessboard?
"Were those same senior members of the Senate meekly acquiescing to Mr. Wright's orders?
"Were those same senior members of the Senate robotically marching forth to recite their provided scripted lines?
"Did Nigel Wright really direct a Senator to approach a senior member of an accounting firm that was conducting an independent audit of the Senate with the intention to either get a peek at the report or part of the report prior to its release to the appropriate Senate authorities or to influence that report in anyway?
"Does the reading of these emails give the impression that Senator Duffy was going to do as he was told or face the consequences?
"The answers to the aforementioned questions are: YES; YES; YES; YES; YES; and YES!!!!!
"The political, covert, relentless, unfolding of events is mindboggling and shocking.
"The precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud.
"However, in the context of a democratic society, the plotting as revealed in the emails can only be described as unacceptable. Putting aside the legalities with respect to some of the maneuvers undertaken and the intensity of the operations, a simple question comes to mind. Why is the PMO engaged in all of this activity when they believed that Senator Duffy's living expense claims might very well have been appropriate?"
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS MORNING
> The Catholic Church entities were released from their obligation to raise $25-million of funds for residential-school survivors as part of a deal in which the government wanted to make sure the groups lived up to other parts of their agreement, The Globe and Mail has learned.
> The family of Kay Carter, one of the two women at the centre of the case that led to the Supreme Court asking Parliament to come up with assisted-dying legislation, is taking issue with the Liberals not giving access to the procedure to those with non-terminal conditions.
> Today is the deadline for seven other senators to pay back $528,000 in disputed expense claims.
> Two MPs defeated in the last election are going to try their hands at provincial politics: Conservative Mike Allen is taking a run at the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative leadership and former New Democrat Rathika Sitsabaiesan is going to seek an Ontario Liberal nomination in a Toronto-area by-election.
> In other leadership ambitions: Quebec MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau is toying with a bid for the NDP leadership and Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch says she regrets announcing a barbaric cultural practices tip line during the last election.
> And the federal Liberals are going to have a special guest pop by this weekend for their cabinet retreat in Alberta: Premier Rachel Notley.
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WHAT EVERYONE'S TALKING ABOUT
"Back in his 2013 speech [to the Senate], Mr. Duffy, trying to persuade fellow senators not to suspend him from the Red Chamber, outlined his claims that the Prime Minister's Office was punishing him for refusing to play ball in a damage-control scheme. They knew he hadn't really broken the rules, or the law, but concocted an apology scenario for him, offered to help him pay, and coerced him to go along, he said. Justice Vaillancourt adopted that Duffy version of events almost entirely." – Campbell Clark (for subscribers).
Don Martin (CTV): "In the end, the guilty verdict was saved for those who didn't know they were on trial – specifically Stephen Harper and the control freaks who ran the Prime Minister's Office as the Senate scandal exploded."
David Reevely (Ottawa Citizen): "If anyone deserved to be nailed up, Vaillancourt found, it was the people working for former prime minister Stephen Harper, led by chief of staff Nigel Wright, who cut Duffy loose as soon as he became a political liability."
Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail): "The media who made so much of this sorry mess weren't really after Mr. Duffy's scalp, of course (although he did make an undeniably attractive target). They were after the prime minister and his loyal fixers. Tantalizingly, Mr. Duffy himself had even promised that he would rip the lid off a 'monstrous fraud.' But there was no fraud – just a bungled and ethically dubious effort by the PM's henchmen to manage their way out of a public relations disaster."
Joe Warmington (Toronto Sun): "Duffy was nothing more than a political scapegoat and a pawn in a bigger game. He was a national treasure for decades, but when he was the one in trouble it seemed all of his friends – media, political and otherwise – abandoned him without considering that all he ever asked for was a fair hearing. Sen. Mike Duffy finally got his due process and the judge rightfully sent this case to the garbage can where it always belonged."
National Post editorial board: "The fact that none of his actions constituted a criminal offence, and did not violate the rules as he found them, justifies neither the rules nor his acquiescence. It demonstrates instead how wanting an institution the Senate had become, how self-serving its financial arrangements, how inadequate its oversight of senators' spending."
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Chris Hannay