Authors: Michael Harris
On October 29, 2013, the opposition continued to grill Harper over Duffygate, and a hapless Stephen Harper stuck to his already discredited story that it was all Nigel Wright’s fault: “On our side, there is one person responsible for this deception and that person is Mr. Wright, by his own admission. For that reason, Mr. Wright no longer works for us. Mr. Duffy should not either.” Liberal MP Scott Andrews pounced on the PM’s hypocrisy. Why should Duffy be dumped from the public payroll? Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro was actually charged with violating election expenses laws and the taxpayers were still paying his salary. When Harper was asked if party lawyer Arthur Hamilton should be fired, the prime minister replied, “This individual is not accused of anything.”
The prime minister’s confabulations and contradictory stories were beginning to catch up with him. It was not true that no one in the PMO other than Wright knew about the secret payment to Duffy. Harper’s longstanding claim that no taxpayer money had been used to pay Duffy was not true. (Taxpayers remit a generous tax credit to donors to political parties, so they in fact paid a portion of the senator’s legal bill.) And if it were true that it was “normal” to pay the legal bills of caucus members, as the PM stated in the House of Commons, why hadn’t Pamela Wallin or Patrick Brazeau been treated normally?
Up until November 2, 2013, the only people Senator Irving Gerstein had spoken to about the Wright/Duffy affair were members of the RCMP. The senator was a very busy man and not only with Senate business. Gerstein collected $290,000 in director’s fees and attended dozens of corporate board meetings in 2012. He is chair of the board of Boston-based Atlantic Power Corporation, which has power generation projects in the United States and Canada. He is also on the board of Medical Facilities
Corporation, whose specialty is private surgical hospitals in the US offering “five-star hotel” surroundings and service.
After it became public that the Conservative Party had paid Duffy’s legal bill, a fact Gerstein himself had never revealed, there was no way even a senator as busy as Gerstein could avoid the question about paying Duffy’s expenses. He gave his answer at the Conservative convention, where, with the exception of guard dogs and bouncers, the party did everything it could to keep the media away from the action.
In his explanation to delegates, Gerstein followed the prime minister’s line and laid it all on Harper’s former chief of staff. It was Wright who asked the party to pay for Duffy’s lawyer, he claimed, and Wright who asked the party to pay off his $90,000 in expenses. “I made it absolutely clear to Nigel Wright that the Conservative Fund of Canada would not pay for Senator Mike Duffy’s disputed expenses and never did.” It sounded like a principled position. But if the party wouldn’t pay as a matter of principle, why had Gerstein told the RCMP the Fund considered paying Duffy’s bills when the amount was $32,000? And why hadn’t he made it absolutely clear that the Fund wouldn’t pay Duffy’s legal bill if using party donations was truly a matter of principle?
The PMO would soon come up with an answer through Stephen Harper’s latest press spokesperson, Jason MacDonald. MacDonald wrote in an email, “The party was assured the invoice was for valid legal fees related to the audit process, and the party paid them on the basis of those assurances.” The mischaracterizations were getting silly. Not only did MacDonald’s story contradict the PM’s explanation that the party had paid because it was “normal” to do so. If that were true, why hadn’t senators Wallin and Brazeau had their bills paid? The PMO knew perfectly well that Janice Payne was an employment lawyer primarily looking after Senator Duffy’s negotiations with the PMO to secretly pay
off his expenses. And then there was the most inconvenient fact of them all: how could the bill have been related to the audit? Senator Duffy never participated in it. And the PMO knew that because it was the PMO that advised him to stay away from it. Nigel Wright’s lawyer responded to the latest piece of PMO fiction with a few icy words that suggested the truth would come out later. “No comment at this time to the latest characterization of events.”
On November 5, 2013, the four hundred and eighth anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the British House of Lords, two political explosions shook the foundations of Canada’s political establishment. Guy Fawkes would have been impressed with the panic they set off in the political establishment.
The mayor of Canada’s biggest city, Rob Ford, admitted after months of public denials that he smoked crack cocaine. The man who was the prime minister’s fishing buddy and the Tories’ key to suburban federal seats around Toronto assured his supporters he was not an addict or a liar; he merely used drugs and only responded truthfully to the “right” question. As for that pesky video in which he appeared to be smoking crack cocaine with fellows who were not Boy Scouts, he had simply been too drunk to remember it. It was not the most shining moment for the party of law and order and family values.
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Three hundred and fifty-three kilometres northeast of Toronto, the Senate of Canada carried out the prime minister’s wishes and voted to suspend Senators Duffy, Wallin, and Brazeau without pay. Although the rules said that such an action could be taken “to protect the dignity and reputation of the Senate and public trust and confidence in Parliament,” the motion to suspend had faced vocal opposition from some senior senators in the Conservative caucus.
Senators Hugh Segal and Don Plett (a former president of the Conservative Party) declared that the motion was in effect
sentencing the three senators before they had been charged, let alone convicted, of anything. In Segal’s view, kicking the senators out and taking away their pay turned “the Senate Chamber into the Star Chamber.” Despite his eloquence, the Conservative majority in the Harper-stacked Senate did the deed in a lopsided vote: Wallin, fifty-two to twenty-seven; Duffy, fifty-two to twentyeight; and Brazeau, fifty to twenty-nine—all results in favour of suspension for two years without pay. Thirty-six senators abstained from the vote.
Among those sitting in the Senate Chamber looking down at the historic vote (only once before had a senator been suspended) was the journalist who had broken the story, Robert Fife. It was a wrenching moment. “I’d known two of these people for thirty years,” Fife told me. “Mike Duffy helped me a lot when I was a young reporter in Ottawa, a lot. People think doing these stories is easy. It isn’t. I felt sick to my stomach that night.”
Senator Patrick Brazeau sat stone still in his place as the results were announced. Earlier, he had pleaded with his colleagues not to believe all the things they had heard about him. “It is very important that you know that I am not a thief, a scammer, a drunken Indian, a drug addict, a failed experiment or a human tragedy.” The last items in his list were a direct dig at Senator LeBreton, who had used those terms to describe his appointment to the Senate.
There was a lot on Brazeau’s mind as he sat there dazed by what had just happened—the criminal charges he was facing, the $49,000 in expenses he had to repay, the loss of his Senate paycheque, and his banishment from the Senate. But there was also gratitude. He walked over to Liberal senator James Munson, a friend and supporter, and shook his hand. In just over three months’ time, Patrick Brazeau would be managing a strip club in the Byward Market. In April 2014, he was charged in another domestic assault, and with cocaine possession. Reporters arrived
at the home to find his personal belongings thrown out in the snow—clothing, a violin, family photographs, his Indian Status card, a legal envelope from the Senate. Brazeau was sent to a rehabilitation facility in Saint-André-d’Argenteuil as a condition of his bail.
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As for the now-suspended Senator Pamela Wallin, she took a moment to talk to the retinue of reporters looking for a comment as she exited the Chamber for what was likely the last time. “I think it’s an extremely sad day for democracy. If we can’t expect the rule of law in Canada, then where on earth can we expect it?” There was no appealing the judgment that her Senate colleagues had brought down on her. She was now a senator in name only, without a paycheque or an office, though all three suspendees retained their health benefits. Wallin walked out into the dark November night and slipped into the back seat of a waiting car. Turning to the throng of reporters, she managed to pull up one last smile. Even through the window, it could not disguise her dismay at her stunning fall from grace. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant coinage came to mind: the rock of the world is built on a fairy’s wing.
As desperately as Stephen Harper wanted the Senate scandal to just go away, the suspension of the three senators under conditions that even some Tory MPs found unfair dominated Question Period the following day. The leader of the Opposition bluntly asked the prime minister if Jenni Byrne, the domineering and abrasive director of the Conservative Party at the time of the Wright/Duffy deal, knew about the plan to repay Duffy’s expenses using party funds. The question got under Harper’s skin. “Without proof, the NDP is making allegations against people. Clearly Mr. Wright acted alone and accepted responsibility for that.”
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Partisan help for the non-answering prime minister came from the Speaker’s chair. Andrew Scheer repeatedly warned Mulcair to stick to government business, not party business. Mulcair schooled
the youthful Speaker on his mistaken premise, and he did it by playing on the most overused meaningless word in the prime minister’s vocabulary: “Just to be clear, perfectly clear, this is about a cover-up in the Prime Minister’s Office. This is government business. This is the public’s business.”
Just as Stephen Harper thought he was making progress on the Senate scandal with the removal of Duffy, Wallin, and Brazeau, Corporal Greg Horton filed his blockbuster Information to Obtain (ITO) to Justice Hugh Fraser on November 15, 2013. An ITO is an affidavit sworn by an investigator stating the grounds for seeking additional documents from their custodians. The contents of Horton’s eighty-one-page ITO provided a spectacular rebuttal to the prime minister’s assertion that the Wright/Duffy affair was not known to others in the PMO. According to the ITO, several senior staffers not only knew about it but were deeply involved in negotiations to settle the matter in a way that might prove illegal. The prime minister had either been misled or he himself had misled the House of Commons.
Often, ITOs remain sealed, but Horton’s was made public five days after he swore out his affidavit. As hard as the prime minister had tried to restrict the Senate scandal to a few bad apples in the Upper Chamber and one deceitful member of his staff (all handpicked appointees of Harper), this limited version of the story was obviously untrue. But the issue of Wright’s $90,000 secret gift to Senator Duffy was eclipsed by even more serious allegations. Corporal Horton alleged new evidence that the PMO interfered in an independent audit commissioned by the Senate, and conspired through multiple PMO staffers to have an official report of the Senate altered to accommodate the demands of Senator Duffy.
Outed by Corporal Horton’s ITO, the Harper government responded with monosyllabic answers or the Cone of Silence. The most important new fact that had been added to the public
discussion was that the chair of the Conservative Party Fund, Senator Irving Gerstein, had been asked by the PMO to approach internal sources at Deloitte to find out if the Duffy audit could be shut down if Senator Duffy repaid his expenses. Gerstein, it was revealed, went to Michael Runia, who was a senior partner at Deloitte, which also audited the Conservative Party Fund. Was Runia the hidden source who supplied PMO staff with an answer to their question and a preview of what Deloitte would conclude about Duffy’s residency issue?
Although the members of the Red Chamber had the urgent duty to get to the bottom of a possibly illegal breach of an independent audit the Senate itself had commissioned, they opted instead to participate in a cover-up. The Conservative majority on the Internal Economy Committee refused to call either Senator Gerstein or Michael Runia. This was not the decision of a body interested in discovering the facts. It was the ignoble ploy of people who wanted to hide them.
Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella also ruled against a Liberal request to look into how the findings of the Deloitte audit got into the hands of the PMO weeks before they were presented to the Senate committee. Even Senator Gerstein got into the act. As chair of the Senate Finance Committee, he ruled out of order a motion calling for him to step aside while the RCMP was investigating a case in which he was involved. Since the Senate wouldn’t go after the facts, Liberal justice critic Sean Casey asked the RCMP to investigate Gerstein’s role in a scandal that had a very well-known centre but no known circumference.
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On November 28, 2013, the three Deloitte auditors who had reviewed Duffy’s expenses made a seventy-minute appearance in front of a Senate committee. It was as close as the public would get to knowing more about Gerstein and Runia’s dealings on the Duffy audit. Auditor Gary Timm confirmed that Ontario
managing partner Michael Runia had indeed called him to ask about the audit, and Timm suggested in his testimony that the call was not appropriate. He told the senators, “It was a short call and it ended there,” with the auditor directing Runia to public information.
Asked about the fact that PMO staffer Patrick Rogers knew in mid-March that Deloitte would not reach a definite conclusion on Duffy’s primary residence, auditor Alan Stewart called the information “troubling” and testified, “I don’t know where that information came from, but it did not come from the investigative team.”
Peter Dent, the national leader of Deloitte’s forensic advisory practice insisted that independence was maintained throughout the audit. “At no time was confidential information shared outside of the forensic team,” he stated, “and Deloitte stands by the content, the quality and the objectivity of the information we provided.” Dent insisted that the call from Michael Runia prompted by Senator Gerstein’s intervention on behalf of the PMO had no effect on their conclusions. When
Hill Times
reporter Tim Naumetz asked Dent how Senator Gerstein could have known that Deloitte was unlikely to make a conclusive finding about the legitimacy of Senator Duffy’s residency claims, Dent replied, “We have no idea.”