Many people say they have difficulty believing Stephen Harper did not know at least something about the various plots hatched out of his office to pay off Sen. Mike Duffy and cover up his bogus expense claims. Maybe he did not know all the details, these people say, but that he did not know anything? That’s hard to believe.
In fact, it is quite easy to believe. For starters, we have the prime minister’s word on it. And not only in private conversation, or in some casual slip of the lip, but solemnly, publicly and repeatedly.
Indeed, he has said so in Parliament: that he did not know anything about Nigel Wright’s payment of $90,000 to Duffy; that had he known he would have stopped it; that not only was he kept in the dark about what his chief of staff had agreed to, but that Wright actively deceived him.
True, the prime minister has never actually answered the question of whether, if he did not know of the cheque from Wright, he knew about an earlier plan to have the Conservative party pay Duffy’s expenses. For example, in response to a direct question in Parliament Nov. 5 — “was the prime minister aware of the initial plan … to reimburse Senator Duffy’s expenses with Conservative party money?” — the Prime Minister responded:
“Mr. Speaker, my position has been clear from the beginning. I told Mr. Duffy that I expected him to reimburse his inappropriate expenses. I was told that that was what happened. As it turns out, that is not really what happened….”
But if the prime minister has declined to answer this and hundreds of other factual questions in Parliament over the past six months, his communications director, Jason MacDonald, chose the past weekend to answer for him. “The prime minister was in no way aware of the discussions with the Conservative party, the Conservative fund,” he told CTV.
Neither did he know (“no, he did not”) that his staff had ordered that a Senate committee report be altered to remove any criticisms of Duffy. Neither (“no”) did he know they had assigned Sen. Irving Gerstein, head of the Conservative party’s fundraising arm, to use his influence at Deloitte, the party’s auditors, who had been asked to conduct an audit of Duffy’s expenses.
To believe the prime minister’s story, then, you have only to believe that his chief of staff and his chief fundraiser — oh and his legal counsel, his Senate leader, and assorted other senior aides and senators, conspired to make a secret payment to a sitting legislator, then tampered with an audit and whitewashed a committee report, without informing the prime minister of any of it. Or perhaps, that they were conned into it by that master of double-dealing, Nigel Wright.
For example, you have merely to believe that when Wright spoke with the prime minister on Feb. 22, having told staff he wanted “to speak to the PM before everything is considered final,” the plan he placed before Harper was not the one hammered out between Duffy’s lawyer and the prime minister’s lawyer, Ben Perrin — that is, for the party to pay Duffy’s expenses, remove him from the audit etc. — but was simply for Duffy to repay his own expenses.
Further, it asks only that you believe that, having lied to the prime minister, Wright then went back to his fellow conspirators and lied to them, claiming to have the PM’s approval for the plan they had been working on: “We are good to go from the PM.” And that, when Wright later told the prime minister’s then communications director, Andrew MacDougall, “the PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to pay the expenses,” he was also lying.
Well, also that Wright kept this secret for months from the prime minister, though they met several times daily; that either the prime minister never asked about the Duffy file again, or that Wright kept lying to him about it; and that even after the prime minister learned of this monstrous, sustained, calamitous deception, on the morning of May 15, he was so stunned that his immediate response was to express, through a spokesman, full confidence in his chief of staff, and, in the days that followed, to defend him as an exceptionally honourable public servant.
It requires nothing more than that you believe that, even after the revelation of Wright’s treachery, the prime minister was kept in the dark about the full extent of the operation, and of the others’ role in it; that, knowing the truth of their own involvement, they nevertheless allowed the prime minister to tell Parliament, falsely and repeatedly, that Wright acted alone; and that, when at length the full dimensions of the cover-up were uncovered, the prime minister, though he had at last been persuaded to accept Wright’s resignation, demanded no similar price be paid by the others who had betrayed him, such as Gerstein.
It asks us to believe a prime minister famous for his controlling ways took almost no interest in what his subordinates were up to; that finding his almost childlike trust betrayed, he reacted with Christ-like forgiveness; and that, notwithstanding his own utter blamelessness, he has refused for months to answer the simplest questions about what he knew, admitting only as much as the belated emergence of facts demands.
It requires that we accept that a prime minister who says he would never have agreed to any piece of the plot — the payoff, the audit tampering, the Senate whitewash — somehow found himself surrounded by people who, on the evidence, tackled the lot without hesitation.
Where could they have got the idea that this was acceptable? How could he have been so wrong about them? Why, it’s almost unbelievable.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Andrew Coyne
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