There is no document, no scrap of paper — not even a Post-it note — detailing any agreement the prime minister’s former chief of staff may have made when he handed Sen. Mike Duffy a $90,000 cheque, the government leader in the Senate said.
“I absolutely do not believe there was any sort of document,” Conservative Sen. Marjory LeBreton said in an interview on the Global News program The West Block with Tom Clark. “That’s my understanding, and to this point there has been no proof or evidence that there was any document at all.”
Rather, she said, she believes Nigel Wright, who quit the Prime Minister’s Office while wrapped in scandal, was trying to do the right thing.
“I just think Nigel made a mistake and thought he could fix this himself,” LeBreton said, reiterating what Canadians have already heard from Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Wright.
Despite the repeated claims, the opposition still isn’t buying it.
“We know that there’s at least a cheque, and that’s paper. We can find out who made the cheque, and was it from a trust fund, and what the rules are of the trust account,” NDP leader Tom Mulcair said Sunday. “There are email exchanges as well … so it’s not true there’s no documentation around this.”
The payment in question came while Duffy’s expense claims were being audited alongside those of Sen. Mac Harb, who stepped down from the Liberal caucus when the audits were tabled, and Sen. Patrick Brazeau, who was kicked out of the Conservative caucus and suspended from the Senate in February following assault and sexual assault charges.
While the audits were ongoing, Duffy announced his intention to repay any money owing. He then stopped cooperating with the auditors.
The audits into the suspicious spending were released earlier this month, indicating that the trio of senators together wrongly collected more than $190,000 in housing allowances.
While all three were accused of committing the same error — and, as a consequence, defrauding the public — the language used in the Senate reports of the Harb and Brazeau audits was more harsh than in Duffy’s.
It was revealed later that the Senate committee had written a more scathing report into Duffy’s audit that was subsequently scrubbed to remove many of the harsher conclusions, effectively shielding Duffy from the findings.
LeBreton, however, shut down any suggestion that the Senate was under instruction to go easy on Duffy since he repaid his erroneous claims.
“The idea that we don’t talk to each other is ludicrous,” LeBreton said, acknowledging that senators discussed the audits and reports with others in government.
But the discrepancy in the language used in the Duffy report wasn’t a consequence of those discussions, she said.
Conversely, the Harb and Brazeau reports were written in a way that would help get the money back. In Duffy’s case, that was no longer necessary, LeBreton said.
“Reports are written in committees all the time. And they’re changed and they’re drafted and they’re re-drafted,” she said. “In the case of Sen. Duffy, there was a debate in the committee about not using that language because the money had been repaid.”
For his part, the prime minister has said he knew nothing of the cheque his right-hand man, Wright, cut for Duffy, nor of any deal the two may have struck.
He told this to reporters while on a trade mission in South America last week, but hasn’t been in the House of Commons – where the opposition can try to grill him – since the story broke.
Mulcair, for one, is looking forward to Harper’s return to the Commons.
“Stephen Harper got elected on a promise of being accountable. Instead, he went into hiding in South America,” he said. “We’ll have him back in the House of Commons tomorrow and we’ll be able to start asking these tough questions he’s been avoiding for a week.”
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