Maybe It's Time For Mike Duffy And Pamela Wallin To Throw Stephen Harper 'Under The Bus' And Come Clean On This Whole Sorry Affair!
When Stephen Harper decided to add Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy to Canada's unelected, undemocratic Senate, he started in motion a series of events that has ultimately become an ugly, nasty political scandal.
For starters, neither Duffy nor Wallin qualified for senate appointment as representatives of their respective native provinces.
While Ms. Wallin is originally from Saskatchewan, she has lived away for most of her adult life and Saskatchewan was no longer her principle residence. Saskatchewan's right leaning corporate MSM came running to Harper's defence and tried to murky the waters about Wallin's residency requirement.
Same with Mr. Duffy. While originally from Prince Edward Island, he has for decades made Ontario the site of his actual 'principle residence'.
In his haste to add these two high powered, Conservative fundraisers to the 'Upper House', Stephen Harper and the Senate turned a cavalier eye to residency requirements for Duffy and Wallin.
Harper most likely instructed his PMO staff to 'make this all happen'. In order to try and maintain the optics of residency in their respective 'home' provinces, both Senators started to declare, in writing, that their principle residences were 'back home' in PEI and Saskatchewan.
Here is where it all went wrong. It is also the reason that Nigel Wright went through his $90,000 cheque contortions to try and help Duffy when the bottom started to fall out of the whole charade.
In order to be appointed to the Senate, ‘principle residence' reality had to be fabricated in order for Harper's appointments to be acknowledged under existing Senate rules. False expense claims were the only way to maintain the charade ...
Stephen Harper wanted both Duffy and Wallin in the Senate so that these well-known Canadians could crisscross the nation and rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for Conservative Party coffers.
Harper created this mess. It is his doing ... and, I predict, it will also be his undoing.
"Principle" and "principal".
So terribly confusing.
Posted by Dana | 9:46 am, August 09, 2013
Harper was Policy Chief for his, Northern Foundation of 1989. He was linked with Christian Fundamentalists among other, very dubious links.
All Dictators have their degenerates, to do their dirty work for them. Harper's list of degenerates is, as long as his arm.
Harper and his so called Cons, have thieved from the tax payers with impunity. I don't care what Politician, nor the party. No Politician has the right to steal from the people.
However. Harper is the worst, most corrupt P.M. in the recorded history of our Nation. Why Harper isn't in prison as a, thieving corrupt, traitor, beats the hell out of me
Posted by gingersnap | 11:02 am, August 09, 2013
You should read Michael Harris' take on this in iPolitics. He quotes an unnamed inside source:
“Maybe someone who didn’t owe anything was forced to go along with this scheme against his will,” says a player with personal knowledge of the events surrounding the Nigel Wright payment to Duffy — not for direct attribution. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if the RCMP were to question people about threats against a sitting legislator to get him to plead guilty to a non-crime for political purposes? Wouldn’t that be interesting?”
If the PM, the PMO and the party had decided to cut Duffy loose and change the channel to Senate reform or even abolition using Duffy as the whipping-boy, why would the PM’s chief of staff give the senator a gift of over $90,000 to pay off the disputed expenses?
Even more curious, why would the original plan have been to use party funds to pay Duffy’s debt? And why would a sub-committee of the Senate’s internal economy board sanitize the audit of Senator Duffy’s expenses as reported by CTV’s Bob Fife on May 17, 2013?
Could the party’s use of Duffy’s services during that election stand up to scrutiny? Was that the part of the story Nigel Wright’s payment was designed to bury? Is that why it was so important to change the channel? As it would later be reported, Senator Duffy was billing Conservative campaigns in Nova Scotia, the GTA, and the Northwest Territories during the election — sometimes while receiving his Senate allowance.
Last word from the source: “It’s a much nastier game than anyone knows, and the real enemies are often among your own teammates.”
I sent Harris' column to an old Tory buddy of mine at his cottage north of Ottawa. His response was that he found the allegations made by Harris' source "deeply troubling and very accurate."
Threats to a sitting senator? What did James Moore tell Duffy when Harper flew him out to Cavendish to confer with the disgraced senator?
There are a lot of veteran Tories who believe Duffy was handed the shit end of the stick by Harper and that there's a huge story that is still sequestered inside the PMO yet to come out.
Posted by The Mound of Sound | 11:14 am, August 09, 2013
Duffy got there for knifing Dion on the last weekend of the election.
I figured Wallen just blowing folks.
Posted by WILLY | 7:10 pm, August 09, 2013
The Bay Street "Wonder Boy" Nigel Wright DOES NOT GIVE AWAY HIS OWN MONEY! Not a single dime came out of Wright's pocket!
It would be a simple matter of Nigel Wright INVOICING the “Conservative Fund of Canada” account (the Conservative Party’s --> taxpayer-subsidized war chest <----) multiple times for some phoney "Financial Consultant Fees" to accrue back the $90K. CPC treates that Fund's coffer as their private "Honey Pot."
Are there any conversations between Conservative Senator Irving Gerstein (Harper’s bagman) and the PMO about Nigel getting paid back from the “Conservative Fund of Canada” — the federal party’s war chest Gerstein chairs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/social/MyTake/mike-duffy-nigel-wright-unanswered-questions_n_3314315_254934263.html
….
Pic ---> Finally, that Nigel Wright / Mike Duffy $90,000 cheque that #PMSH @pmHarper trying to hide http://twitpic.com/cwufaq #cdnpoli #hw
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Posted by Nadine Lumley | 7:45 pm, August 09, 2013