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Telling the difference between the personal and the professional is difficult when you’re as famous a person as Sen. Mike Duffy.
Duffy, the former broadcaster and celebrity son of Prince Edward Island, is on trial on 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery, and some of the counts have to do with using his Senate-funded travel to go to P.E.I. for the funerals of friends and acquaintances. With Duffy now testifying in his own defence, his lawyer Donald Bayne spent Friday morning discussing those trips with him, aiming to show that they were all legitimate.
It’s unquestionably tricky. Duffy’s cousin, Mary McCabe, died of brain cancer in February 2012, and he flew from Ottawa to Charlottetown and attended her funeral (on a one-day trip that had him back in Ottawa for a Valentine’s dinner with his wife). He’s charged with defrauding the Senate for the expense of it.
Besides being Duffy’s cousin, McCabe had been a P.E.I. government official, director of its child-welfare department, Duffy testified.
“Prior to that she had been director of child welfare for the City of Edmonton, Alberta,” Duffy testified. “Another Islander who went away and came back. She brought her knowledge to P.E.I. She brought a lot of knowledge and technique and innovations that our province had not seen … When I went to the funeral, I was struck by the number of groups who were there represented and came over and spoke to me about how their interests were advanced by her enlightened thinking.”
Prince Edward Island, population 142,000, is a small place, but one with a full-blown provincial government and numerous towns and cities, each with their own governments. A very large percentage of the population could be said to be “VIPs,” people whose funerals and memorials would be legitimate events for a Canadian senator to attend on the public dime.
Duffy, a gregarious sort from a big family, knew an awful lot of them. He flew out and attended the funeral of Cliff Stewart, an old hero of the Second World War known as “the Spy from P.E.I.” for his involvement in training and supplying French resistance fighters. Was Cliff Stewart a big deal? No question.
Was he also a friend of Duffy’s? Yes he was. They’d met at a mutual friend’s barbecue and shot the breeze more than once. Duffy choked up on the stand remembering him.
“I’d heard of him before, growing up as a kid, he was kind of a legend,” Duffy said. “In his later years I’d attend this summer barbecue and we’d sit in lawn chairs and chat … Cliff reminded me of what my father would have been like had he lived to be 90.”
Duffy flew to Halifax for the funeral of a woman he’d known in school, Jackie Proude; Duffy and her husband Garth had even once been roommates. But both Proudes were prominent Maritimes musicians (Jackie Proude’s father had been in Don Messer’s band), and Garth was also a major distributor of Yamaha musical equipment. So many big-time musicians were at the wake it was halfway to a ceilidh before it was done, Duffy testified.
“Would you have made this trip if you had not been a senator?” Bayne asked him.
“No,” said Duffy. “I would have sent a letter or a card.”
But had he not been a senator, of course, he also would have had to pay for the trips himself.
Much of this activity mirrors the trips Duffy took on behalf of the Conservative party, where he deployed his celebrity at the service of the party but was also, plainly, a Canadian senator going around bringing the prestige of the Senate wherever he went. Almost by definition, wherever a Canadian senator goes, he is doing the business of the Canadian Senate.
To be sure, Duffy also did some sort of explicitly public business on these funeral trips. While in Charlottetown for Mary McCabe’s funeral, he squeezed in a talk with a Charlottetown politician about the city’s expensive sewage-system problems. At a funeral for a friend of his brother’s, he met a consultant (with whom he often talked on the phone) working on ways of getting industrial work for Prince Edward Island out of big government procurement contracts. During the visit for Cliff Stewart’s funeral, he met a P.E.I. politician about a suspended federal program for letting rich investors get Canadian citizenship more readily.
These short trips cost thousands and thousands of public dollars, but Bayne is intent on showing that the public always got some sort of work out of them.
Belt and suspenders, every time.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
Duffy, the former broadcaster and celebrity son of Prince Edward Island, is on trial on 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery, and some of the counts have to do with using his Senate-funded travel to go to P.E.I. for the funerals of friends and acquaintances. With Duffy now testifying in his own defence, his lawyer Donald Bayne spent Friday morning discussing those trips with him, aiming to show that they were all legitimate.
It’s unquestionably tricky. Duffy’s cousin, Mary McCabe, died of brain cancer in February 2012, and he flew from Ottawa to Charlottetown and attended her funeral (on a one-day trip that had him back in Ottawa for a Valentine’s dinner with his wife). He’s charged with defrauding the Senate for the expense of it.
Besides being Duffy’s cousin, McCabe had been a P.E.I. government official, director of its child-welfare department, Duffy testified.
“Prior to that she had been director of child welfare for the City of Edmonton, Alberta,” Duffy testified. “Another Islander who went away and came back. She brought her knowledge to P.E.I. She brought a lot of knowledge and technique and innovations that our province had not seen … When I went to the funeral, I was struck by the number of groups who were there represented and came over and spoke to me about how their interests were advanced by her enlightened thinking.”
Prince Edward Island, population 142,000, is a small place, but one with a full-blown provincial government and numerous towns and cities, each with their own governments. A very large percentage of the population could be said to be “VIPs,” people whose funerals and memorials would be legitimate events for a Canadian senator to attend on the public dime.
Duffy, a gregarious sort from a big family, knew an awful lot of them. He flew out and attended the funeral of Cliff Stewart, an old hero of the Second World War known as “the Spy from P.E.I.” for his involvement in training and supplying French resistance fighters. Was Cliff Stewart a big deal? No question.
Was he also a friend of Duffy’s? Yes he was. They’d met at a mutual friend’s barbecue and shot the breeze more than once. Duffy choked up on the stand remembering him.
“I’d heard of him before, growing up as a kid, he was kind of a legend,” Duffy said. “In his later years I’d attend this summer barbecue and we’d sit in lawn chairs and chat … Cliff reminded me of what my father would have been like had he lived to be 90.”
Duffy flew to Halifax for the funeral of a woman he’d known in school, Jackie Proude; Duffy and her husband Garth had even once been roommates. But both Proudes were prominent Maritimes musicians (Jackie Proude’s father had been in Don Messer’s band), and Garth was also a major distributor of Yamaha musical equipment. So many big-time musicians were at the wake it was halfway to a ceilidh before it was done, Duffy testified.
“Would you have made this trip if you had not been a senator?” Bayne asked him.
“No,” said Duffy. “I would have sent a letter or a card.”
But had he not been a senator, of course, he also would have had to pay for the trips himself.
Much of this activity mirrors the trips Duffy took on behalf of the Conservative party, where he deployed his celebrity at the service of the party but was also, plainly, a Canadian senator going around bringing the prestige of the Senate wherever he went. Almost by definition, wherever a Canadian senator goes, he is doing the business of the Canadian Senate.
To be sure, Duffy also did some sort of explicitly public business on these funeral trips. While in Charlottetown for Mary McCabe’s funeral, he squeezed in a talk with a Charlottetown politician about the city’s expensive sewage-system problems. At a funeral for a friend of his brother’s, he met a consultant (with whom he often talked on the phone) working on ways of getting industrial work for Prince Edward Island out of big government procurement contracts. During the visit for Cliff Stewart’s funeral, he met a P.E.I. politician about a suspended federal program for letting rich investors get Canadian citizenship more readily.
These short trips cost thousands and thousands of public dollars, but Bayne is intent on showing that the public always got some sort of work out of them.
Belt and suspenders, every time.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
