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The Crown’s case against Sen. Mike Duffy is so flimsy prosecutors have resorted to cheating, Duffy’s defence lawyer argued in his closing submissions in the fraud and bribery trial Tuesday.
Crown attorneys Mark Holmes and Jason Neubauer “misstated” trial evidence in their own final arguments Monday, abandoned parts of the case they said they’d prove at the outset last April, claimed contradictions in Duffy’s own testimony that they never gave him a chance to explain and want Judge Charles Vaillancourt to make legal errors as he considers his decisions on the 31 charges Duffy faces, defence lawyer Donald Bayne contended.
It’s all part of an effort to “ignore key parts of the evidence and try to hopscotch through a long tapestry of evidence and pick threads here and there and try to knit together a Crown prosecution case,” Bayne charged.
Duffy is accused of fraud and breaching the public trust in using Senate resources for his own ends — for billing the Senate for trips that were basically personal, for claiming his longtime home in Kanata was a secondary residence and being reimbursed expenses for it and for arranging Senate contracts for an old friend that he used as a slush fund to pay expenses the Senate wouldn’t ordinarily cover. And he’s accused of bribery on the grounds that he took more than $90,000 from then-prime minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright to repay some of those expenses as part of an effort to squash a growing scandal over his behaviour.
To take the charges seriously, Bayne said, Vaillancourt will have to disregard that Duffy had no motive to spend public money on himself. The Crown’s forensic accountant, who combed through Duffy’s finances, found that he and his wife Heather weren’t in a crunch. They weren’t rolling in cash but they had credit and equity in their Kanata and Prince Edward Island properties.
“The whole underlying rationale for the first 28 counts, indeed the whole 31 counts is … that Sen. Duffy was in financial straits and had therefore a financial motive to commit financial crime. All of that has been abandoned,” Bayne said.
If Duffy’s old friend Gerald Donohue was really operating a slush fund for him — which covered expenses like a makeup artist, a personal trainer Duffy says was consulting on a national fitness program for seniors and an honorarium for an unpaid office volunteer — then it wasn’t a classic example of such a fund, Bayne said.
“If it was a slush fund, Sen. Duffy would have been handing money with one hand to Mr. Donohue and receiving it back into his pocket with another,” Bayne said. “There is proven absence of motive. And the Supreme Court of Canada says when there is proven absence of motive, that is powerfully in favour of the accused.”
He scorned testimony from Sen. George Furey, now the Speaker of the Senate and a longtime member of its committee on internal administration. Furey had testified that it wasn’t written anywhere that he couldn’t use the Senate’s money to get his own lawn mowed, but he knew intuitively that that was the case. It doesn’t need to be written down, Furey said.
No, said Bayne, you have to look at the rules.
“What is common sense in a trial is identifying accurately the legal issues. What are the workplace policies and practices?” Bayne said. “Is anything a prohibited act here? What is the relevant evidence, and all of it, in connection with the applicable legal issues?”
Do that, he said, and you’ll see that Duffy never did anything wrong. Senate papers said that by definition, Duffy’s primary residence was in the province for which he was appointed — namely Prince Edward Island, not Ontario. Written policies said that any element of public business, anything at all, would justify billing the Senate for trips — even if, as in one case, Duffy had one lunch with British Columbia business leaders and spent days hanging out with his family in Vancouver over New Year’s.
“It’s one thing not to like the Senate rules, which is really at the heart of the Crown’s submission,” Bayne said. “Then change them. But don’t criminally prosecute and seek to convict someone for living under them.”
Bayne was to finish his arguments Tuesday afternoon. The prosecutors, Holmes and Neubauer, get an opportunity for a brief reply, and then the case goes to the judge.
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Crown attorneys Mark Holmes and Jason Neubauer “misstated” trial evidence in their own final arguments Monday, abandoned parts of the case they said they’d prove at the outset last April, claimed contradictions in Duffy’s own testimony that they never gave him a chance to explain and want Judge Charles Vaillancourt to make legal errors as he considers his decisions on the 31 charges Duffy faces, defence lawyer Donald Bayne contended.
It’s all part of an effort to “ignore key parts of the evidence and try to hopscotch through a long tapestry of evidence and pick threads here and there and try to knit together a Crown prosecution case,” Bayne charged.
Duffy is accused of fraud and breaching the public trust in using Senate resources for his own ends — for billing the Senate for trips that were basically personal, for claiming his longtime home in Kanata was a secondary residence and being reimbursed expenses for it and for arranging Senate contracts for an old friend that he used as a slush fund to pay expenses the Senate wouldn’t ordinarily cover. And he’s accused of bribery on the grounds that he took more than $90,000 from then-prime minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright to repay some of those expenses as part of an effort to squash a growing scandal over his behaviour.
To take the charges seriously, Bayne said, Vaillancourt will have to disregard that Duffy had no motive to spend public money on himself. The Crown’s forensic accountant, who combed through Duffy’s finances, found that he and his wife Heather weren’t in a crunch. They weren’t rolling in cash but they had credit and equity in their Kanata and Prince Edward Island properties.
“The whole underlying rationale for the first 28 counts, indeed the whole 31 counts is … that Sen. Duffy was in financial straits and had therefore a financial motive to commit financial crime. All of that has been abandoned,” Bayne said.
If Duffy’s old friend Gerald Donohue was really operating a slush fund for him — which covered expenses like a makeup artist, a personal trainer Duffy says was consulting on a national fitness program for seniors and an honorarium for an unpaid office volunteer — then it wasn’t a classic example of such a fund, Bayne said.
“If it was a slush fund, Sen. Duffy would have been handing money with one hand to Mr. Donohue and receiving it back into his pocket with another,” Bayne said. “There is proven absence of motive. And the Supreme Court of Canada says when there is proven absence of motive, that is powerfully in favour of the accused.”
He scorned testimony from Sen. George Furey, now the Speaker of the Senate and a longtime member of its committee on internal administration. Furey had testified that it wasn’t written anywhere that he couldn’t use the Senate’s money to get his own lawn mowed, but he knew intuitively that that was the case. It doesn’t need to be written down, Furey said.
No, said Bayne, you have to look at the rules.
“What is common sense in a trial is identifying accurately the legal issues. What are the workplace policies and practices?” Bayne said. “Is anything a prohibited act here? What is the relevant evidence, and all of it, in connection with the applicable legal issues?”
Do that, he said, and you’ll see that Duffy never did anything wrong. Senate papers said that by definition, Duffy’s primary residence was in the province for which he was appointed — namely Prince Edward Island, not Ontario. Written policies said that any element of public business, anything at all, would justify billing the Senate for trips — even if, as in one case, Duffy had one lunch with British Columbia business leaders and spent days hanging out with his family in Vancouver over New Year’s.
“It’s one thing not to like the Senate rules, which is really at the heart of the Crown’s submission,” Bayne said. “Then change them. But don’t criminally prosecute and seek to convict someone for living under them.”
Bayne was to finish his arguments Tuesday afternoon. The prosecutors, Holmes and Neubauer, get an opportunity for a brief reply, and then the case goes to the judge.
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