The Duffy trial took on a couple of different avenues yesterday – the courtroom drama itself, and journalists off-site poring over the reams of evidentiary data, most especially his calendar pages which held a trove of normally secret caucus information, and some like The Canadian Press, even started to match up expenses to diary dates. If nothing else, the trial is providing that glimpse into the caucus room that we are generally shut out of. As for the courtroom itself, where the star witness was the former Senate law clerk, and the fairly existential question of just what the requirements for a senator’s residency are was the topic of discussion. Duffy’s appears to be a prima facia case of not really being eligible to sit as a senator from PEI – particularly because Duffy himself could not keep up his own end of that bargain. But the point his lawyer was trying to make is that there are no real rules around those requirements, or what “primary” and “secondary” residences are. The problem with Duffy’s defence, yet again, is that these rules should have been self-evident. If you’re appointed to represent a certain region, you maintain your main residence in that region and you have the documentation to prove it, and your residence in Ottawa should reflect the nature of it being secondary, and for work purposes. That there were no rules spelled out in any foundational constitutional documents are a reflection that this was self-evident. (Granted, it also reflects that Parliament only sat a few months of the year then as well, but that’s not really the point). The point is that in the absence of rules, is there a licence to abuse them? Or should there be the presumption that if one has been appointed to the Senate of Canada, that they should have enough intelligence and good character to understand what it means to represent a region and maintain your primary residence there – after all, they will be reviewing legislation from this point hence. One has to wonder if the court can even answer this kind of a question, but in the absence of that kind of power, it should remind us yet again that there is one person responsible for appointing someone who can’t figure out this most basic of questions, and that person is Stephen Harper. Nicholas Köhler looks at how the defence is portraying Duffy as a naïf in light of these lax rules. And of course, the Ottawa Citizen has your behind the scenes look at the day’s events.

Good reads:

• From the Duffy Diaries, Peter MacKay believed that Dimitri Soudas set him up with the whole Cormorant chopper airlift incident.
• Another Duffy document shows him having scratched out “primary” residence on his paperwork to put “PEI residence” and “NCR [National Capital Region] residence.”
• The government announced their balanced budget legislation is on the way. Kevin Page calls out its political motives.
• Pierre Poilievre is praising the government’s bill to basically make safe injection sites impossible to open.

Odds and ends:

The Liberal are pushing for a wider investigation in to NDP MPs using their constituency offices and staff to organize electioneering “Days of Action.”

Mulroney-era finance minister Michael Wilson has been named chair of the Mental Health Commisson.

And hat tip to @gmacofglebe for digging up the episode of Rick Mercer Report where he spent a day with Mike Duffy.