The sordid mess transpiring in the trial of Sen. Mike Duffy matters in the current election campaign. It shows the people Stephen Harper has elevated to prestigious posts, and to powerful roles around him. His choice is a measure of his fitness to lead the country.
Back in 1946, the imagery of the three wise monkeys – one each with ears, mouth, and eyes covered – was sufficiently well known that American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson had no need to explain when he jeered of the Nuremberg defendants, “These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence.” Nor in Ottawa did Sen. Duffy and the Prime Minister’s Office fix-it squad. A more specific fourth monkey might be added. Read no evil – holding out a cellphone with screen turned away from its bearer.
A grimmer passage springs to mind from a 1660 post-Restoration trial in England, where Maj.-Gen. Thomas Harrison was on trial for his life. The unrepentant Puritan soldier bluntly asserted that what he was accused of – helping put King Charles to death – “was not a thing done in a corner.” Harrison was invoking words uttered centuries earlier by the Apostle Paul while defending himself in court against grave charges. No such proclamation of clear and open action has emerged at the Duffy trial. It cannot.
That Nigel Wright’s benevolence in flipping $90,000 to enable Duffy to repay his Senate expense claims was not done openly, with a media release and photo op as the cheque was handed over, has been explained away as being something foreseen as bad political optics. People might get the wrong impression. The Prime Minister’s Office Mr. Cleans were trying to make an obvious political problem go away, end up out of sight, out of mind. Quietly. Their furtive approach generated a far bigger problem.
Wright has never been charged with bribing Duffy, nor does the prosecutor assert that he did. The suggestion that Duffy perceived as a bribe something, which was not so intended by Wright, is ludicrous. Bribery is a two-sided transaction. Has Wright been promised immunity in exchange for his testimony, and his earlier assistance to the RCMP? Prosecutors do not like the questions which arise from openly immune testimony.
The defence of Duffy to other charges against him has been to say that the Senate expense rules are ambiguous. Perhaps so, but Duffy preferred to cash-barrel through them, rather than resolve the ambiguities by minimizing the impact on the public purse.
Probably Harper now rues his questionable appointment of Duffy as a Senator from Prince Edward Island, despite receiving legal advice that Duffy was not resident there. As to the boys in the Prime Minister’s Office, an old term applies – the king’s evil counsellors. In days of yore, attacking such minions was a necessary evasion when it was dangerous to suggest that the king was doing wrong. To date, Harper’s underlings emphasize that he was oblivious to their doings.
Writer David Haas is a long term St. Albert resident.
