NOTE: I was pleased to read Andrew Coyne’s article on this same topic in this weekend’s National Post – he too has homed in on the real issue – see below - in the Duffy charade and for those of you wishing some more analysis on this, I would encourage you to read his article. K.D. G.
As in the Judge, the Prosecutor and the Defence.
And if Harper is lucky their failure to engage in the quest for the truth, might just save him.
The Trial has been about Duffy’s apparent freeness with taxpayers’ money and whether he was forced by the evil forces in the PMO to take $90 grand to repay a hapless public.
But the more serious issue and what we could call the elephant in the room …the courtroom that is, is that the PMO worked frantically to find a way to rewrite a Senate Report before it got released.
The draft report named Duffy as a Senator who had wrongly misspent his expense account and the PMO knew if it got released the Prime Minister would look bad because he had appointed the Duffster and Senator Duffy had been a most effective fundraiser for the Tories.
Harper himself had called Duffy a most effective and energetic Senator.
Even so, don’t think for a moment that the Tories cared a fig about the Duffy’s welfare. Indeed, his then Chief of Staff said he was abhorred to learn of the Senator’s spendthrift ways.
No their concern from the start was to whitewash the Senate Report before it got released and they – the PMO from the Chief of Staff to the head of the Tory Fund – to the in-house legal counsel worked tirelessly with the Senior Tories in the Senate to amend the report to get Duffy’s name deleted.
The only way they could do it was to have Duffy repay the monies in question from Duffy’s own resources or pay it for him - as what Nigel Wright eventually did out of his own pocket.
So that brings us to the present – senior Government Officials are not supposed to have reports whitewashed through use of funds even if those funds turn out to be their own.
That dear reader is the real issue but it is being avoided like the plague by our three mice.
And why is that you ask?
Glad you did.
It is hard to fathom the charge of bribery against Duffy … the bribee and not against the briber …Wright.
Since the Crown did not charge Wright – they have no interest in stirring up evidence against Wright might prove a bribe took place. Hence they avoid this issue in their questioning.
The Defence too has no wish to dwell on it – since if they did – they would not only implicate Wright in malfeasance – but their own client.
And the Judge appears willing to follow the Crown and Defence along in this charade.
In the scheme of things what is going on here is small potatoes – but I am a stickler for integrity and over the years have been sad to see it lacking in the successive governments and for the last 10 years with our Liberals in Ontario. But I had higher hopes for the Conservatives.
It is all the more ironic that Harper came into government 10 years ago to clean up the Senate and had his lads just left the Duffster to his own devices – the responsibility for his irregular spending would have fallen entirely on him.
And at the same time it would have provided greater public support to fix a broken down organization.
As I see it…
‘K.D. Galagher’
