Roundup: An incredulous picture by the defence

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As we head back to the Duffy courtroom for week two, there are a couple of pieces of note. David Reevely is incredulous at the picture being painted by Duffy’s lawyer – that somehow, a man who has been desperate to be on Parliament Hill and who has haunted it since the early 1970s was somehow naïve about the way that the place worked and was such a “rookie” that he had trouble following its intricacies. In other words, yeah right. James Cudmore, meanwhile, looks at the Duffy Diaries and sees in them Duffy’s personal desire to be a player, and those diaries break down some of his façade for the public. The desire to be a player is not news – it’s long been a fact of life on the Hill that Duffy coveted a seat in the Senate and the romantic (and utterly false) notion of the “taskless thanks,” and a former PEI senator used to say that Duffy would check his pulse every time he shook his hand, and Duffy certainly let several prime ministers know that he wanted the job, and finally Stephen Harper took him up on it in his mass of panic appointments in late 2008 during the coalition crisis, despite all of the warning signs (including Duffy’s prior conviction in Tax Court of trying to fiddle with his expenses on television). Duffy had previously said that the only question Harper had asked him was his commitment to Senate reform – such a long ago notion now that we have the Supreme Court reference that lays out the path for such a notion – but it’s clear from Duffy’s actions that it wasn’t really the case. He wanted to be a player, remember, and so he took up the torch for Harper. There are plenty of other Senators, even Conservative ones, who don’t do any fundraising for the party, but Duffy was fully aboard with it, his partisanship ratcheted up as he attacked opposition MPs, premiers of other political stripes, and put on dog-and-pony shows about the Economic Action Plan™, which led to that now infamously signed photo. Does this sound like someone who was a poor naïve legislator who was trying to fumble his way through the flexible rules of the Senate? I’m not sure that’s the picture that the broader context paints, but one has to wonder how much any of this will be the fodder of the Crown. It’s still early days in the trial, but one should be wary of the portrait the defence is painting of Duffy and the institution itself.

Good reads:

  • Mike Duffy didn’t fully winterize his “primary” PEI residence until 2012.
  • The Duffy Diaries reveal tensions in the caucus over the frankly ridiculous Senate reform plans as had been proposed at the time.
  • Remember when Harper formed government, and he was going to refocus on the Caribbean and Latin America? Well, it hasn’t worked out that way, and our influence in the region is fading fast.
  • Mark Kenney writes about Harper’s caution on Cuba at the close of the Summit of the Americas.
  • Hilariously, Leona Aglukkaq is writing to the provinces about their lack of action on climate change, because she’s shown such tremendous leadership on that file. Jean Charest, meanwhile, says there’s no reason that the government can’t get behind Trudeau’s province-led plan, except that it’s from the Liberals and that would never do.

Odds and ends:

Two top researchers resigned from the selection committee of the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame because there were no female finalists, for dubious reasons.

CRA is auditing the Steelworkers Humanity Fund charity, again leading to cries of targeting.

Here’s a fascinating look at some of the archaeology of Parliament Hill.