Party of One (42 page)

In two emails sent to others in the PMO, Wright showed flashes of the anger he was beginning to feel toward the Senate leadership: “Please convey my thanks to Sen. LeBreton’s office for making this more difficult. . . .” and “To repeat Patrick [Rogers], no further action from that office at all without pre-clearance from us.”

On February 11, 2013, Wright’s plan to dispose of the Duffy expenses problem appeared to be going backwards. Duffy had consulted his lawyer, employment expert Janice Payne, and provided Wright with several talking points outlining why Duffy felt
legally entitled to his National Capital Region housing allowance. But Duffy also outlined possible terms under which he might repay his expenses. He wanted to be extricated from the Deloitte audit, reimbursed for his legal fees, and given mutually acceptable media lines that would be followed by his colleagues in the Senate.

The next day, Senator Tkachuk visited the Langevin Block and huddled with Wright for a twenty-minute meeting. Tkachuk wanted to explain the audit process the Senate had put in motion. Both men agreed that Duffy had to repay the money, even though technicalities in Senate rules may have allowed his claim. To Nigel Wright it was not a matter of technical compliance but of morality. He became more convinced than ever that a way had to be found to repay Duffy’s expenses in a fashion that would bring the unhappy senator on board.

After Tkachuk left, Senator Irving Gerstein arrived for a two-hour meeting. The visitors’ log didn’t say who he was there to see or who was with him. Two names are redacted.
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As head of the Conservative Party Fund, Gerstein had asked Wright if there was any way he could help. If the Fund picked up Duffy’s $32,000 in disputed expenses, there would be no need for Duffy to be subjected to the Deloitte audit. But a question hung over that possibility. If Duffy’s housing expenses were cleared up, why was it important for him to avoid the audit?

The Senate, meanwhile, was bailing desperately as the water continued to come in over the gunnels. On February 12, the Red Chamber suspended Patrick Brazeau. The Conservative motion to put him on a paid leave of absence “in order to protect the dignity and reputation of the Senate” passed unanimously, save for Brazeau’s lone shout of “no” that echoed through the Senate. He had been freed on $1,000 bail after spending one night in jail.

If Mike Duffy was hoping for an early Valentine’s present from Stephen Harper, he was disappointed. The meeting with the prime
minister that Duffy and Wright had agreed to after Wednesday morning’s caucus took place on February 13, 2013. According to Duffy, as he would explain in a sensational speech to the Senate eight months later, the PM said, “It’s not about what you did. It’s about the perception of what you did that has been created in the media. The rules are inexplicable to our base.”

Duffy attempted to defend his housing claims to the PM. Nigel Wright took the opposite position. As he would later remember it, the PM listened to both men and then told Duffy to pay the money back because the public “would not expect or accept such claims” since he actually lived in Ottawa rather than Prince Edward Island. Duffy pressed his argument that he was just following the rules like all the others, but the PM bluntly ordered him to “pay the money back.”

Senator Duffy had been around politics long enough to know that what a prime minister wants, he gets. But he was also well aware of how perilous his situation could become if he agreed to pay back money he did not believe he owed. It would be an admission of guilt, a blow to his reputation, and most important of all, it might put his Senate seat in jeopardy since it would be tantamount to the admission that he wasn’t a resident of Prince Edward Island.

The political opposition smelled blood in the water. On the same day that Harper, Duffy, and Wright met, the leader of the Official Opposition kicked off Question Period with the Senate scandal. Thomas Mulcair asked about Senator Wallin’s claim for over $300,000 in travel expenses and made the accusation that she was actually running up big bills while doing partisan work for the Conservative Party: “Less than 10 percent of these expenses were for travel in Saskatchewan, the province she is supposed to represent. Senator Wallin is using taxpayers’ money to travel around the country and to star in the Conservative party’s fundraising activities.”

Despite the ongoing audit, the PM made the blunder of defending Wallin’s expenses in the House, saying he had personally reviewed them: “I have looked at the numbers. Her travel costs are comparable to any parliamentarian travelling from that particular area of the country over that period of time.” Less than two weeks later, with Wallin’s problems worsening, the PM’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, told reporters in an email that the PM never intended to suggest he had personally reviewed and approved Wallin’s expenses. It would be one of many times in the Senate scandal that the PM would “clarify” what he had said.

The Opposition also raised questions about whether another Conservative senator, Dennis Patterson, actually lived in Nunavut, the territory he had represented since 2009. In fact, he owned a home in Vancouver, and was rarely seen in Nunavut except at official functions, although he too collected the annual $22,000 housing allowance. Although he was the legal leaseholder of a property in Iqaluit, it had allegedly been rented to someone else. Was it Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau, and Mac Harb all over again? How many other senators were sponging off the public? The Senate’s Internal Economy Committee interviewed Patterson and deemed his claims to be in order. But these days, no one was taking the Senate’s judgment of its own activities as the final word.

The perception of Conservative foul play was reinforced on February 15, 2013, when Aboriginal affairs minister John Duncan had to resign after it became public that he had written to a tax court judge on behalf of a constituent. The latest contretemps forced the prime minister to have a mini–cabinet shuffle. The PMO was getting twitchy.

Watching events in Ottawa from PEI, Mike Duffy had several conversations with Wright, who was also working hard on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiations at the time and no doubt begrudging the time he
had to invest in the Senate mess. Duffy was not pleased that some Senate colleagues had called him in PEI, urging him to repay his expenses. According to Duffy, one of them left several nasty messages on his answering machine, including one that implied he should stop acting selfishly: “Do it for the PM and the good of the party.”

As for his greatest fear—losing his Senate seat—Duffy was told that the PM would publicly confirm that he was entitled to sit as the senator from PEI, provided he went along with the plan to repay his expenses. Several lawyers representing the PMO, the Conservative Party, and Duffy were now involved in behind-thescenes negotiations. Duffy was insisting that any proposed deal be put in writing, a sign that perhaps an earlier verbal deal had not worked out to his satisfaction. It seemed that he wasn’t about to make the same mistake again—trusting his political masters to keep their word.

While Duffy was being reassured that the PMO would protect his Senate seat, Nigel Wright was worried. The PMO had been discussing a proposed definition of residency. In a February 15, 2013, email to Benjamin Perrin, special advisor and legal counsel to the prime minister, Wright wrote, “I am gravely concerned that Duffy would be considered a resident of Ontario under this ITB. Possibly Sen. Patterson in BC too. If this were adopted as the Senate’s view about whether the constitutional qualification were met, the consequences are obvious.”

The PMO was clearly worried that the Conservatives were facing the real prospect of losing senators. In Wright’s view, getting something agreed to by the Senate on residency was all that stood in the way of Duffy paying back the $32,000 and ending the matter. Nigel Wright cast himself as puppet master, pulling the Senate’s strings from the PMO because the government’s own leadership in the Red Chamber had so far failed to deliver. In a
memo to Patrick Rogers, manager of parliamentary affairs in the PMO, Wright wrote:

We are going to need to manage the briefing of the Conservative Senators. . . . We cannot rely on the Senate Leader’s office to get this right. . . . have to do this in a way that does not lead to the Chinese water torture of new facts in the public domain, that the PM does not want. . . . I think we should lay out the scenario in a brief memo to the PM. . . . It is clear to me that Ben [Perrin] and I should brief Senator LeBreton directly. Chris [Montgomery] simply does not believe in our goal of circling the wagons. Because of his lack of buy-in, it was impossible to discuss meaningfully the parliamentary strategy. . . . will work with Ben to get something for the Prime Minister tonight. . . . I will look to you Patrick, involving Ben, me and Joanne as much as necessary. . . . because getting confirmation of qualification residency is all that is needed to close out the Duffy situation . . . and to stop our public agony.

Wright’s stunning memo made a lot of things clear, from the political price the Conservatives were paying for the Senate scandal, to the fact that Prime Minister Harper was being briefed on the Duffy situation. Harper received a memo that his office was working with Senate leadership “to seek to bring an end to concerns regarding the constitutional residency of some of your Senators.” This separate and dangerous issue had become entangled in the expenses debacle surrounding Duffy and Wallin.

By February 19, 2013, the PMO was discussing proposed media lines, and Senator LeBreton’s office, having felt the full force of Nigel Wright’s displeasure, was working closely with the PMO. LeBreton conveyed her zeal to cooperate in an email to Wright: “. . . My office will work very closely with PMO and Carolyn [Stewart Olsen] as we go forward. We are making progress.”

Just when things seemed to be looking up, Senator Duffy threw Nigel Wright a curveball. In a call from PEI, the senator informed Wright that he didn’t have the money to repay the expenses. Duffy asked Wright for the name of a government lawyer his own lawyer could contact. Wright told him to have Janice Payne contact Benjamin Perrin, special advisor and legal counsel to the prime minister. It was the final straw for Wright as far as the personal touch was concerned. Unhappy with the new level of complexity Duffy had injected into his best efforts to make the problem go away, Wright informed Duffy that from now on the matter would be dealt with lawyer-to-lawyer.

But that was before help appeared and Wright renewed his direct discussions with Senator Duffy. On February 20, 2013, Senator Tkachuk called Wright with a solution to everyone’s problems that he and Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen had devised. Duffy would write to Deloitte requesting the amount of his inappropriate expenses, admit to an honest mistake, and pay back the money. The Senate Steering Committee would then stop the Deloitte audit. Wright later told Duffy that the PMO would assist with the communications approach. More importantly, Wright would also look into potential financial sources to provide the cash.

Despite Wright’s assurances, Duffy kept the pressure on in his own way. On the day that Tkachuk communicated his proposal for a solution to the PMO, Senator Duffy told Nigel Wright that he would be forwarding redacted copies of his diaries for the past four years, along with other information that would back up his claim that he was a resident of PEI. Wright in turn emailed the director of issues management in the PMO, Chris Woodcock; the PM’s legal counsel, Benjamin Perrin; and others in the PMO, alerting them that documents from Duffy were on the way.

Was there more to the Old Duff ’s decision to send his diaries to the PMO than met the eye? The diaries covered four years,
and contained detailed notes of the senator’s travel, meetings, teleconferences, social events, holidays, important current events, speeches, and political interactions. Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair had already accused Senator Pamela Wallin of running up huge travel bills, raising money for the Conservative Party on the taxpayers’ dime. Would Duffy’s diaries confirm that she wasn’t the only one? And just as important, had the senator from PEI done it with instructions from on high?

Wright was cautious about using the diaries. In an email to his PMO staff, he wrote, “Our team will have to look at that to see if there is anything in it that we would not want his lawyer to send to the Senate steering committee. Maybe it will persuade us to let him take his chances with Deloitte’s findings. If not, then I have told him I will be back on his case about repayment. I have told him that we have comms and issues management materials in preparation.”

After reviewing the Duffy diaries, the PMO decided to meet the senator’s terms, but they also demanded that he meet theirs. Wright called Duffy and told him that the PMO had been working on lines and a scenario for Duffy to use in the media and that all of his other concerns, including cash for payment, would be met. For his part, Duffy would have to repay his debts with interest and stop talking about the issue in the media. But according to Duffy, Wright applied a little pressure of his own to persuade him to accept the deal. The senator remembered being told that the Steering Committee of the Internal Economy Board was preparing to issue its own report on the question of his residency and they were not looking favourably on him.

At a news conference held October 21, 2013, the day before Duffy’s passionate speech in the Senate, his criminal lawyer, Donald Bayne, read from a memo Duffy had written to his lawyer on February 20, 2013, after talking to Nigel Wright. Duffy wrote,

Somewhere in the midst of this, he [Nigel] said that the steering committee of the Internal Economy was preparing to issue their own report on the issue of residency. . . . they would trump Deloitte by saying that their analysis of my file is going to say that I was in violation of the rules and wasn’t eligible to sit as a senator from PEI. I asked where does this committee get the power to pronounce on these things? Sounds to me like they are way out of their depth. No one gave them authority to make these findings on their own. He said David Tkachuk and Carolyn Stewart Olsen were the majority on the steering committee, and they wanted this.