And so the trial in Ottawa of Senator Mike Duffy lumbers on toward the end of its fourth week.
Since the initial media feeding frenzy, coverage has moved from the front pages to the national pages and, on some days, no pages at all. Most of the parliamentary press pack is on to the budget, the debates, the polls and whether former Con MP Dean Del Mastro will serve jail time for his Elections Act spending violation convictions.
Those still stuck in the courtroom, where Duffy is fighting 31 charges related to bribery, breach of trust and fraud, are subjected to the minutiae of Senate rules – and whether they even exist. What constitutes a primary residence? What may be expensed? Is the $80,000 Duffy claimed for wherever he lived whenever legitimate?
Every once in a while there’s been a spark. The makeup artist. The personal trainer. The intern. Payments for Twitter troll control and to former SUN-TV mouthpiece Ezra Levant for speech writing. And those high-octane “garlic cabbage rolls” that roiled his digestive system.
Earlier this week, news surfaced of a not-to-be released secret Senate report on how many of Duffy’s honourable colleagues could document where they actually lived. More social media excitement followed. What, if anything, could the Cons be hiding?
But bottom line, it’s all been a tad anticlimactic, at least to Canadians who were hoping to see Old Duff take Harper down.
Until, last week, that is when the National Observer, the alt news site recently reborn out of the Vancouver Observer with the help of an $80,000 Kickstarter campaign, caused waves with a report on some of the “redacted” portions of Duffy’s detailed electronic diary.
Redacted in quotes because, as many have observed, the blacked-out portions might as well have been marked with fluorescent highlighters. It was easy to read what was ostensibly meant to be covered up.
The Observer’s Mychaylo Prystupa cites numerous 2012 diary entries that record both meetings and, in Duffy-speak, “telcons” with Steve Wuori, then president of Enbridge Liquids Pipelines, as well as with Enbridge board member Jim Blanchard, a U.S.-based lawyer and lobbyist and former Michigan governor and American ambassador to Canada.
Coincidentally – or not – this was not long after the devastating Enbridge spill in Kalamazoo, and at the same time that the hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline from the tar sands to the BC coast were to begin. This was also when talk was heating up about reversing Line 9 so it could carry Alberta bitumen across Canada. There was no doubt that Enbridge would face fierce opposition from environmentalists and First Nations.
Also in 2012, DeSmog Blog’s Emma Pullman had exposed Levant’s “ethical oil” web of connections to the PMO, laying bare the tar-sands-promoting pitch for what it was.
Last but not least, this was also when the HarperCons and Levant, with whom Duffy had been in contact, began decrying the “radical groups” and “foreign money” supposedly flooding into Canadian environmental charities.
In between his confabs with the Enbridge execs, Duffy also had meetings and/or conversations with Vivian Krause, the West Coast freelance writer who had made a name for herself by – as the Financial Post’s climate change-denying Terence Corcoran put it – playing with tax data to nail green groups.
In short, as the Observer reported, Krause, intentionally or not, laid the foundation for the Harper government’s $13.4 million fund created in 2012 to audit groups like the David Suzuki Foundation and West Coast Environmental Law. If they were discovered to be playing politics, their charitable status would be revoked.
All of which is why the Observer has suggested that there was some lobbying hanky-panky going on between Enbridge and Duffy. Enbridge denies it.
In a statement to the media, the company says, “At no time did Enbridge solicit Senator Duffy’s help to lobby the federal government. In the interest of clarity, we also took the extra step to notify the Prime Minister’s Office at the time that Senator Duffy did not represent Enbridge or our interests.”
As if Enbridge, which probably has a direct pipeline to the PMO anyway, needed Duffy to play man in the middle. Besides, its lobbying efforts are all duly documented.
Still, the NDP’s Charlie Angus and Murray Rankin have been trying to get answers in the House.
“Why did the prime minister ask Mike Duffy to send him a note on, I quote, Enbridge Line 9 problems, on February 17, 2012, and what was contained in the note Mr. Duffy sent to the prime minister’s chief of staff and Enbridge executives on February 20 of that year?” Rankin demanded on Monday, April 27.
Harper attack dog Paul Calandra ignored the question, redirected as usual and went on the offensive, raising the issue of the NDP’s office expenses.
It’s worth noting that, during her appearance at the June 2012 Senate finance committee hearings, where Duffy filled in for a colleague who was off sick, he gave Krause a very sympathetic ear, asking why she was doing all this research at her own expense. And yet, as his own diary points out, he personally made moves to help her financially. For example, six months earlier, he made calls to get her speaking engagements.
None of this is illegal, of course.
But the PMO knew he was trying to grease political wheels. It’s right there in Duffy’s diary on February 17, 2012: “PM asks send me a note on Enbridge Line 9 problems.”
Why the corporate media consider this less explosive news than his digestive issues with cabbage rolls is curious.
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