{"id":32438,"date":"2015-08-19T03:00:36","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T07:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32438"},"modified":"2015-08-18T07:38:32","modified_gmt":"2015-08-18T11:38:32","slug":"the-duffy-affair-try-explaining-it-in-just-one-sentence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/19\/the-duffy-affair-try-explaining-it-in-just-one-sentence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Duffy Affair – try explaining it in just one sentence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh<\/a> on the Senate scandal that is convulsing the Parliamentary Press Gallery from coast-to-coast (actually, it’s more like from Gatineau to Nepean):<\/p>\n

I wish I\u2019d captured the exact quote from Twitter, but a paraphrase will have to do: someone said recently, \u201cIf you want to feel better about Canada, try explaining the Duffy-Wright scandal to someone from another country in one sentence.\u201d I cannot help feeling that there is something to this. Our media have blitzed a courtroom and consumed great newspaper acreage over a very technical and complicated topic. There is no glamour in the affair, by world standards \u2014 phrases like \u201cpaid for hookers,\u201d \u201chired a death squad\u201d or \u201cdonations from the Klan\u201d are absent.<\/p>\n

Dubious billing procedures by politicians make for good stories. They helped bring down an Alberta government not long ago. But that news story involved using public resources for partisan purposes. In the case of Nigel Wright \u2014 as distinguished from the issue of Mike Duffy being a scurrilous, greedy trimmer, a truth we did not need a trial to tell us \u2014 the fundamental problem is what the Conservative party and Wright did to defray the questionable expenses imposed upon the treasury.<\/p>\n

A scandal and a shame it may be, but in an upside-down way. Mike Duffy\u2019s expense claims have not yet been found to be legally or procedurally wrong. Duffy was unwilling to pay them back. Nigel Wright tried to pre-empt the issue by making use of his personal fortune. It\u2019s a \u201cscandalous\u201d donation of private dollars to the public treasury.<\/p>\n

If I ask what is actually scandalous about this, I am guaranteed to receive several different answers. The Conservatives are charged with having considered paying Duffy\u2019s expenses out of party funds, which, I am told, are \u201cpublic\u201d in nature because they are supported by a tax subsidy. The Conservatives did, of course, contemplate using party funds \u2026 but didn\u2019t. And those funds, though subsidized, exist precisely to be applied ad libitum for partisan convenience.<\/p>\n

Another theory is that Wright\u2019s payment was, by its inherent nature, a \u201cbribe.\u201d The Conservatives, covering up bribery! \u2014 non-lawyers are fond of that one. Whether Duffy was guilty of accepting a bribe is, of course, one of the issues in the trial. It is even less clear that Wright is guilty of having offered a bribe: in law, a bribe does not take two to tango. Under the Criminal Code, giving a bribe means giving money to a legislator in order to get them to do something, or not do something, \u201cin their official capacity.\u201d There are plenty of speculative theories about what Wright had to gain from paying Duffy\u2019s expenses: none, as far as I can see, involve Duffy\u2019s official conduct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colby Cosh on the Senate scandal that is convulsing the Parliamentary Press Gallery from coast-to-coast (actually, it’s more like from Gatineau to Nepean): I wish I\u2019d captured the exact quote from Twitter, but a paraphrase will have to do: someone said recently, \u201cIf you want to feel better about Canada, try explaining the Duffy-Wright scandal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,28],"tags":[413,553],"class_list":["post-32438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-media","tag-scandal","tag-senate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8rc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32439,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32438\/revisions\/32439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}