Authors: Michael Harris
Wherever the tip came from, the PMO was not slow to seize the advantage and see the way forward. The manager of parliamentary affairs in the PMO, Patrick Rogers, wrote, “I would propose that the Senator continue not to engage with Deloitte. I
believe that we should make arrangements for repayment knowing that Deloitte will not say one way or another on his residency.” Benjamin Perrin, added his thoughts: “At a minimum, I think in good faith they [Senator Duffy and his lawyer] need to know the info you found out. We would then need to convince them why they should do nothing. The Senator’s instinct may be to go in and fight this out again with Deloitte. . . .”
Nigel Wright agreed with his PMO colleagues. “I do agree with Patrick’s suggestion. . . . I would suggest that they send a similar response . . . that since Sen. Duffy has taken off the table the one issue DT [Deloitte] was asked to review, they do not see a purpose for that review. They will want to add ‘or any reason to provide the information requested.’ We can never suggest they say this latter bit, because we cannot trust them never to say that the PMO told them not to respond to DT’s requests for information. . . .”
On March 22, 2013, Wright and Benjamin Perrin called Janice Payne to persuade her that the best course for the senator was to pay his expenses and stay away from Deloitte. The next day, Payne sent over a draft of her letter to Deloitte, adopting the PMO line that their review was now moot, given Duffy’s decision to repay his expenses. She asked for comments from Wright and Perrin. In an email to Perrin, a triumphant Nigel Wright gave his blessing to what were virtually the PMO’s own words: “I think this is perfectly fine (and I resist making minor suggestions since I would prefer to be able to answer, if necessary, that the PMO did not write it).”
It was now time to get the cash to Duffy. Wright emailed his executive assistant David van Hemmen with his final instructions on the matter: “My cheque is in the correspondence folder. I don’t have enough funds in my chequing account, so I have emailed Murray Culligan to ask him to transfer them in from another account.” The trust requirement was that Duffy repay the expenses
before he received the money from Wright on March 26, 2013. On that day, PMO lawyer Benjamin Perrin received an email from Janice Payne’s office informing him that “we have just sent the cheque to Senator Tkachuk by courier.” It was the final, revealing step of the deal, confirming as it did that the PMO knew about the plan to make it appear that Duffy was repaying his expenses himself through his personal RBC account. The man Nigel Wright said didn’t have the money, or the means of raising it, had managed to secure a $90,000 bank loan to complete the deception.
On the same day that Payne informed the PMO of Duffy’s repayment, she also apprised Deloitte, telling the auditor that their review was now unnecessary—just as the PMO advised. As long as everyone involved kept their mouths shut, the public would never know what had actually happened.
Cash from the deal continued to flow. On April 4, 2013, Conservative lawyer Arthur Hamilton sent a cheque for $13,560 “Re: Agency Matter,” to Janice Payne, drawn on his firm’s trust account with the Bank of Nova Scotia. The money that went to pay Duffy’s lawyer, who had negotiated the deal between her client and the PMO, came from Conservative Party donations subsidized by taxpayers.
On April 16, 2013, three Deloitte auditors gave a verbal presentation of facts to the subcommittee, including more expense trouble for Duffy. It appeared that he had made improper per diem claims while he was actually vacationing in Florida. That evening, weeks before Deloitte issued their report, Tkachuk tipped Duffy to what he had learned from the auditors. “Mike, you have a problem,” Tkachuk said, advising him to straighten things out. Two days later, Duffy sent a confidential letter to Tkachuk, blaming a temporary worker in his office for the Florida per diem mistake. He offered to immediately reimburse the Senate and appear before the auditors or subcommittee. No one wanted Duffy anywhere
near a microphone in a public place, and the Senate decided his appearance would only prolong a process that needed to end.
Senator Tkachuk also talked to another embattled senator, Pamela Wallin, before the auditors had finished their work, allegedly telling her to omit information from her calendar that was not relevant to the claims under scrutiny, before she turned the calendars over to Deloitte. As things got worse in the Wallin case, the prime minister asked the PMO to begin developing “scenarios” for responding to her gathering expenses scandal.
Reporter Duffy had spent most of his working life with his ear to the ground in Ottawa. Senator Duffy still excelled at picking up information and what he was hearing was sufficiently troubling that he paid a visit to the government house leader in the Senate, Marjory LeBreton. Duffy sought assurances from LeBreton that his deal with the PMO was being honoured. LeBreton told him not to talk to the media, and to wait for the results of the audit. She assured him they were working on a plan to manage things once they had received the audits and prepared the Senate reports. “I told him once again that he must trust us on this and not complicate the issue by talking to the media.”
More than three weeks after the senator received Nigel Wright’s hand-delivered bank draft at Janice Payne’s office, Mike Duffy finally issued a public statement that he had repaid the $90,000—though he didn’t mention when. He had crossed the Rubicon—or been dragged across it by all the prime minister’s men. Following media lines from the PMO, the Senate confirmed the payment but, like the senator, didn’t say when the transaction took place.
Nigel Wright still worried about whether the Senate would keep Duffy’s residency issue out of their upcoming reports. Duffy’s lawyer continued to press the PMO for further assurances that her client would not be booted from the Senate or investigated
further by Deloitte or any other party. Since he already knew what Deloitte would be saying, Wright understood that everything now depended on the Senate report. Wright had to be sure that senators LeBreton and Tkachuk were onside—a delicate task, as Wright explained to Benjamin Perrin and Patrick Rogers: “It has to be handled very delicately. We are not asking the Senators to absolve him of anything—they would refuse that, quite properly. We are asking them to treat the repayment as the final chapter of the expenses issue relating to his designation of the PEI cottage as his primary residence to this point in time.” According to Wright, both Tkachuk and LeBreton had already agreed. It was now merely a matter of coming through for the PMO, something in Wright’s opinion they had not done a very good job of doing, as he would shortly report in a secret memo to the prime minister.
LeBreton responded to an email from Wright on April 28, assuring Wright that she was doing her best to keep a lid on the residency issue: “. . . Just to assure you, I will double my efforts to ensure that there is no reference to the legitimacy of Senate seats in the report to be tabled as a result of the audits. It has never been the Internal Economy’s mandate to adjudicate on such issues. . . .”
The next day, Wright personally attended a meeting with Senators LeBreton, Tkachuk, Stewart Olsen, and others to discuss the Deloitte reports they had received. For the first time, he was officially informed that Deloitte could not determine residency in Duffy’s case—information Wright already received from Patrick Rogers through Senator Irving Gerstein on March 21.
The heavy hand of the PMO in an exclusively Senate matter did not go over well with Christopher Montgomery, issues manager for the government in the Senate. Senator Stewart Olsen passed on to the PMO what Montgomery had been telling senators. In an email to Patrick Rogers, she wrote, “Montgomery says we as Senators should not compromise ourselves.” Rogers forwarded the
email to Wright, and curtly responded to Stewart Olsen: “This is the direction. You are not compromising yourself. You are fulfilling commitments that were made.”
Caught between the expectations of the PMO and the better judgment of the PCO, the Senate committee went to work on a draft report that would be issued in the Senate’s name. Liberals in the Senate were clamouring for the information to be sent to the RCMP. On May 7, 2013, the PMO was provided with a copy of the draft Senate report. Wright claimed that he never saw the report, but other PMO staffers did and briefed him. They weren’t happy with the wording, “as they felt it did not reflect the Deloitte findings.” Senior PMO staffers Chris Woodcock and Patrick Rogers worked on changes. Emailing Rogers and Woodcock, Wright offered a glum appraisal of what the senators were trying to do and what they were actually achieving: “They think they are hurting Duffy, but they will end up hurting the Prime Minister.”
The Steering Committee met again on May 8, 2013, at 2 p.m. Before that meeting, Patrick Rogers presented Senator Stewart Olsen with the PMO’s changes and reported back to the PMO: “I gave her our changes. She agreed with them 100%. I reinforced with her that implementing all of the changes to the report was the fulfillment of her commitment to Nigel and our building. She indicated she understood this.” Wright offered a wry reply, revealing his appraisal of how Senator Stewart Olsen operated: “. . . I am sure she blamed someone else for the inflammatory language.” Rogers replied, “You are correct. It was all Tkachuk’s fault.”
The most damaging findings touching Duffy in the draft report were that his travel patterns were not consistent with maintaining a primary residence in PEI, and that the Senate’s residency rules were “very clear” and “unambiguous”—contrary to the Senator’s public statements that he found the forms confusing.
On May 8, 2013, Senator David Tkachuk paid a visit to the clerk of the Senate, Gary O’Brien. He explained to the clerk that he and Senator Stewart Olsen wanted to make changes to the Senate report dealing with Duffy. Since Tkachuk needed the report for a meeting of the fifteen-member Internal Economy Committee to take place that afternoon, he simply made the changes that had been asked for by the PMO without convening the committee.
On May 9, 2013, the Deloitte report and the final Senate report were made public. Senator LeBreton emailed Wright to ask if there was any way to get Duffy to stay away, “and most importantly avoid any media.” Woodcock followed up; “I spoke to Duffy. He won’t do any media and will stay away from the Chamber today.”
The revised Senate report mimicked the scripted lines out of the PMO and the conclusion of the Deloitte report regarding Duffy’s primary residence. But though the two reports conformed to the outline of the Wright/Duffy deal, the price had been an immense internal contradiction in the Senate report. Where Duffy was exonerated because of the complexity of the Senate’s rules governing residency, Senators Brazeau and Harb were castigated for breaking rules that were allegedly crystal clear. The Senate report went on to say that since Duffy had repaid the expenses, the Deloitte review was no longer necessary. Senator Tkachuk told reporters the news Nigel Wright had been longing to hear for months: the case was now closed.
Not every Conservative senator was satisfied that the culprits had been properly dealt with. On May 9, 2013, Senator Linda Frum emailed Ray Novak, deputy chief of staff in the PMO: “Feel compelled to speak out. . . . By protecting our own we are making Marjory and the PM look terrible. . . . I feel safe in telling you that our caucus would support forced resignations. These are my friends so this is painful to even write. But the PM’s reputation— and that of the Senate caucus—is going down in flames.”
Less than a week later, Robert Fife lifted the lid off the Pandora’s box of Duffygate. Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a statement that was even more bizarre than Wright’s $90,000 gift to Duffy. He didn’t know a thing about the deal, and except for Nigel Wright, no one else in the PMO did either.
fourteen
WRECKING BALL
O
n May 14, 2013, a sunny spring day in the capital, the government of Stephen Harper was hit by a wrecking ball from the near space of network television. It was in every way a remarkable turn of events.
For seven long years, the Conservatives had successfully hobbled the national press by restricting the flow of information. Bureaucrats, government scientists, and cabinet ministers had all been silenced, except for the speaking points provided to them by the PMO. Even the location of cabinet meetings was secret. Journalists were banned from the second floor of the Langevin Block, where the prime minister has his office. Government workers were forced to sign “silence for life” loyalty agreements if they wanted to keep their jobs. As for the prime minister himself, he rarely held press conferences and always restricted the number of questions.
So it was particularly fitting that the story that changed everything came from Parliament Hill veteran Robert Fife, who didn’t think journalists should have relationships with politicians, and
wasn’t much interested in photo ops. He conducted himself in the best traditions of print journalism, where his career had begun. He lived with a phone in his ear and dug into things. The walls of Fife’s fourteenth-storey office in downtown Ottawa are festooned with awards: two citations of merit from the National Newspaper Awards, the Edward Dunlop Award, and a 2012 Canadian Association of Journalists Award for television. Fife had broken a string of big stories, including the then defence minister, Peter MacKay’s, publicly provided helicopter ride from a private salmon camp on the Gander River in Newfoundland.
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But none of them compared to the story he had put together in twenty-four hours and was about to break that spring night. It was, simply put, the biggest story of his life.
The backstory had already been in the news for some time. Arising out of reviews by the Senate Internal Economy Committee, irregularities had been found in the expenses of a handful of senators, including Mac Harb, Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin, and Mike Duffy. In Duffy’s case, he had paid back $90,000 in “inappropriate” expenses in March, claiming that his mistake had been an innocent one based on confusing Senate rules governing housing allowances.