Topic related open thread.
Not all decisions have been read yet, but everything is going as expected by everyone except the politically motivated.
Update: Cleared on all 31.
Topic related open thread.
Not all decisions have been read yet, but everything is going as expected by everyone except the politically motivated.
Update: Cleared on all 31.
It doesn’t mater. Duffy was a useful prop for the media while campaigning for the Spawn. The mindless middle human ballast of the electorate took in enough of the saturation coverage to form an opinion of corruption regardless of the facts. Mission accomplished!
This trial was never about senate expenses, it was about smearing Harper government during last election for political purposes.
Actual headline on Rabble.ca:
“Duffy found not guilt on residency — but Harper does not look good”
It’s still all about Harper for the progressives.
Duffy was the biggest mistake of Harper’s career,a fat slob whose entitlement personality epitomized the Senate to a lot of Canadians.He was as much a resident of PEI as I am of Manitoba.
Harper disappointed me in his Senate appointments, going with the elite rather than real Canadians who could have brought something to the House of sober etc.,etc.
Ya shoulda taken my suggestions,Steve, Gunney 99 and Kate McMillan, you might still be PM.
Well, like they say, there’s no getting around Mike Duffy.
(Not without a good long walk.)
“Actual headline on Rabble.ca: ‘Duffy found not guilt on residency — but Harper does not look good'”
Never mind that Harper is a quiet backbencher in the official opposition party now and essentially irrelevant these days.
Those rabble.ca folks are precious, aren’t they?
Did you ever notice the unseemly haste with which their love affair with the late el Presidente Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution was expunged from their consciousness?
The residency part?? When he was appointed, he had a residence in PEI. Having a residence makes you a resident. Being a resident of one jurisdiction does not make you a non-resident of another jurisdiction. You can have multiple residences. As the judge said, the Senate itself in expense reporting used residency as the place of appointment, PEI. He didn’t even break the Senate rules, much less the Criminal Code.
That fat pig harmed Mr. Harper … He should be jailed for that alone.
I knew he would get off… And when discussing it with my very Liberal, eastern (aka UI recipient loving) in laws, they would proclaim, cynically that they thought he would get off too. ‘No, he’ll get off because he should get off; because the entire thing is another faux scandal trumped up against him in order to make Stephen Harper look bad.’ No response.
The thing is if Duffy was found guilty of that residence thing, the majority of the Senate would have to be charged and found guilty as well.
My favourite line of discussion with my in-laws went like this: ‘He wasn’t really a resident, his residence is really only a cottage that he uses in the summer.’ Me: ‘So you mean he goes to work somewhere else for the winter and then comes back to his cottage in PEI to sit around for the summer. Sounds like everybody else in the maritimes… Except he has the decency not to draw pogey in the summer.’
The big mistake in this w hole mess was the conservatives fear of the media. The lesson here is you tell the truth and tell the press who is trying to cook your goose to take a long hike off a short pier. Except you shouldn’t be that polite.
Remember, the Duffy trial was switched with the Max Harb trial. How would that have affected the election campaign, given the mediocracy went ballistic over every seedy detail of Duffy’s trial, and Peter Mansbridge, while fawning over Justin with not a word about his, evident then and now, ridiculous platform, lectured, hectored and maneuvered Harper into a referendum on his selection of Duffy into the Senate. Now that the mission is accomplished, the smoke and mirrors can be put away until needed.
Again, random events having little or nothing to do with the executive leadership of this federation, became pivotal and decisive to the final outcome, thanks to the many ethically challenged media types. This was yet second to the free ride our mediocracy gave Justin and the rent seekers, while blathering on about some idiot in a niqab, Duffy and a dead boy on a beach, killed by his father’s criminal behaviour. When they bothered to look at our relatively good economic performance, it was, again incorrectly, bad news and of course Harper was at fault, so he had to go.
Notice the mediocracy’s hand in all of this? They’re the “criminals” in this affair. All in slime without nuance, but apparently holding “the Stephen Harper government” to account, just like they do with all parties in government? Sure, and political whores work for free.
When the Max Harb trial comes up, I’m sure the mediocracy will apply the same standard as they did with Duffy’s, blitzkrieg coverage of every slimy nuance, while making the trial a critique of Grit leadership, competence and ethics. Anyway what will it matter, in that place at that time eh?
I feel there’s an equal chance of that here as Hillary getting indicted down South. IOW not a snowball’s chance in heck and no more bothering with Senator trials because Duffy’s had the desired effect of taking the Tories off message so the mediocracy could substitute no style but substance for nice hair and zero substance, aside from pontificating about subjects Justin knows nothing about – IOW anything related to politics, economics, science or common sense.
Workers get fiscally whipsawed in the bargain as again Liberal values substitute for Canadian values, with spending OPM foisted up as leadership.
With any luck at all, both institutions will end up in the scrap heap. That will be up to us who see this the government by whim for what it is. We also know, however, that no lie, omission or sliming is beyond the capability of our Grits and their incestuous mediocracy comrades.
The mediocracy cannot be allowed to carry the electoral message to the voters ever again. That is job one for new leadership.
Looks like not guilty on the slush fund contactss. The judge used a wonderful expression – “there was no oversight to avoid.”
We have to realize that the burden in criminal cases is set high for a reason. In this case it is irrelevant because the trial had the positive outcome all the lefties hoped for – a successful coup d’etat.
Yes, TimR. The nuts at twitter are painting this as a conviction of Harper!
https://twitter.com/hashtag/duffy?f=tweets&vertical=news&src=tren
The media hacks are now going to say Duffy is getting charges dropped but the blame will be put on the PMO.
Duffy was mad as a wet rooster because Harper booted him which was a normal reaction. harper should never have gotten involved, he should have said let the Senate deal with it, PM’s do not make Senate rules or have anything to do with running it, they appoint and that’s it. Chretien would have shrugged and whistled off.
Didn’t Duffy lose 2 year’s pay despite being innocent. Time for the Senate to make right with him.
The thing I will always remember about Duff was how shocked he was at
the horrible betrayal by Ottawa of Canadian Embassy local hires when
Saigon was collapsing. Those people could have easily left weeks earlier
on American flights but were assured they had nothing to worry about as
they would go at the time everything wound down. Duff got out on a flight
by the skin of his teeth as did the ambassador’s limo. The local hires
were left for the North Vietnamese to “process” at their leisure.
Harper is a backbencher, but he is not irrelevant. His very presence is a stark reminder of the level of incompetence that Canadians accepted when they ousted Harper and put in Justin. Canadians allowed themselves to be manipulated by the faux scandal around Duffy and the left’s relentless demonization of Harper and the Conservatives — much of it unjustified. There will be a price to pay, starting with the punitive and pointless “carbon tax”. Hopefully Canadians will enjoy paying up.
So what was the chain of command here?
Who instigated these charges?
Who agreed to proceed?
Who decided to charge a man with breach of laws,which do not exist?
Was this a political charge,somehow laid against Duffy in violation of the separation of bureaucracy and politician, or was this bureaucratic overreach?
To whom do we give the credit for the Duffy Circus?
A media feeding frenzy on nothing of substance, endless noise and now?
A blind drunk could have predicted this result.
There are no rules for our appointed troughers, hence it is legally impossible to violate these rules.
How much of our wealth was wasted on this phoney scandal?
Basic lesson for dumb taxpayer; None of our parasitic overlords are accountable to anyone, shut up and pay up.
The findings made no difference to the Harper haters. If Duffy were found guilty on any, it would be proof Harper hired a crook. Now that’s he’s not guilty on all (pause for bleats of “not innocent”) again it’s Harper’s fault for mishandling the file with the RCMP. IOW situation normal, it’s always Harpers/Tories/evil right winger’s fault, which isn’t a tough conclusion when blame is axiomatically never assigned anywhere else.
The trial was a political afterthought. Duffy and Harper had already been convicted, not entitled to due process such as the endless though futile MSM attempt to bury Adscam, by an unethical bunch of biased ignoramuses just in time for the last federal election.
Can’t wait for the extensive coverage of the Max Harb trial, or the expose of how Justin lied to us about the deficit, the recession and the scores of other broken promises and chicanery. I’m not holding my breath. This has never been about anything other than getting Harper out. Mainsbridge and his fellow incompetents ensured those were the only arrows out of the MSM’s biased quiver.
Same crap, different decade from the only Liberal are Canadian values crowd.
“Duffy was the biggest mistake of Harper’s career,a fat slob whose entitlement personality epitomized the Senate to a lot of Canadians…”
Amen to that. Duffy was always about Duffy – and everyone on Parliament Hill knew he was a shameless self-promoter. Harper knowingly put a pig in a palace, so what did he expect…no more hog behaviour?
That twitter feed is interesting. Those people want blood, if not Duffy’s then Harper’s. Can’t believe they are still whining about the Ghomeshi verdict. They rail about the justice system being broken but none of them bring up that Karla Homolka is living freely among them.
Best tweet though was from the Beaverton:
Recently acquitted Mike Duffy claims courthouse as second residence.
Clearly not many here had dealings with the PMO and their aggressive agenda. They were by and large in my opinion a bunch of rosy cheeked know it alls who were there to pursue an aggressive and repressive agenda they neither understood or cared about. It was game and they were mini kings with undeserved power. The really sad thing is the same wonks and ideologues and narrow agenda dim wits are still running the party. There is no hope of changing the Liberals sunny ways, so if any on the right ever want to sniff power again the challenge is root the morons out of the party apparatus.
And has the PMO been any different since Trudeau I was in power.
I am sure Mr Harper is still laughing every morning over his coffee at the fool the liberal sheep elected.
Blow it out your ear, and other places. Are you utterly stupid? The MSM was out to get Harper, and any excuse would do. They were out to get Duffy because he was the only one of the Ottawa MSM who was not a fawning leftist, and had made it into the Senate.
I agree with all of that, Shamrock, but it’s worse still. A public stampede created and whipped on by the MSM succeeded in logrolling the RCMP into an investigation and the CA into filing charges. CA’s know bloody well what is sufficient evidence and what is not. The judge’s ruling was damming. The judge found that the CA did nothing to contradict Duffy’s own testimony. Worse, the judge found Duffy to be a credible witness.
But it got worse. The judge found no evidence of mens rea. Nor did the Crown provide any such evidence. And the Crown would have known all this from pre-trial motions. In short, there was never a chance of conviction.
So this has all the trappings of a witch-hunt, aided and abetted by the so-called justice system. What kind of a society do we live in when the MSM can create a witch-hunt and co-opt the justice system into pursuing it?
Long past time to fiscally burn down the Kommunist Broadcasting Korporation’s financial house. I hold James Moore and Stephen Harper in part responsible for this. They had a chance to deal properly with the CBC and let them off the hook. Next time, it needs to be done right; raze it to the ground and salt the earth, as Cato the Elder said.
Odd comment Peter. I’m not sure what aggressive agenda you are talking about. Harper was not aggressive at all or the CBC would (and should have) been burned to the ground and the ashes taken out to sea.
He would have stacked the Senate so that once he was gone he could still sit back and savor the power, the power!
He would have dramatically reduced the size of governement.
He would have rooted out the civil servants who didn’t play ball made an example of them (Kind of like Chretien did to Francois Beaudoin)
And he would have made sure he and his family carved out a very significant patch of power for when his tenure as PM was over.
No what we had in Harper was a fundamentally honest PM who was not corrupt and managed to steer us through some really tough economic times, and ultimatley balanced the budget without leaving the cupboard bare – and largley left the institutional left intact.
Like Wallin, Duffy was put in the Senate to make use of his celebrity status. He was to carry the message to the boonies & raise money for the Party.
In other words, a long way from the old, impossible Reforn cause of EEE, which Harper rode in on.
The breaking scandal merely showed the country the contempt that the Government had for the institution:
From the judge:
“Was Nigel Wright actually ordering senior members of the Senate around as if they were mere pawns on a chess board?” Vaillancourt asked.
“Were those same senior members of the Senate meekly acquiescing to Mr. Wright’s orders? Were those same senior members of the Senate robotically marching to recite their scripted lines?
“Did Nigel Wright really direct the senator to approach a senior member of an accounting firm that was conducting an independent audit of the Senate to get a peek at the report or part of the report prior to its release to appropriate Senate authorities or to influence that report in any way?
“Does the reading of these emails give the impression that Sen. Duffy was going to do as he was told or face the consequences?”
Yes, Vaillancourt concluded, citing a number of email communications that were entered into evidence.
“The precision and planning of this exercise would make any military commander cry,” he said. “In the context of a democratic society, the plotting revealed in the emails can only be described as unacceptable.”
I wonder if Duffy will sit as an Independent?
Had Harper been aggressive he might have been reelected. Conservative voters were screaming for liberty, property rights and smaller government and got very little, if any, of it. Then they expected con voters to eagerly show up. Nyet, tovarishch.
Now we have the gov’t that 60% of Canada really wants.
It was LeBretton and the PMO that threw Duffy et al under the bus, they were certain of what the media would do with the info. There never was a problem with what the institution was all about…it was modeled after the endlessly Tory dominated House of Lords to achieve the same purpose, a brake on ambition by adventurous PMs. Now the “change agents” have effectively neutered the only real deterrent to PMO dictatorship in majority governments. The elites who desired this outcome will bide their time till next turn at the trough…dollars to donuts a new set of rules that will demand obedience to the PMO (whoever runs it).
Yep – The whole problem started with Marjory LeBreton’s dithering. She seemed totally naive as to what to potential outcome of her indecision. Why the Senators didn’t circle their wagons and defend themselves is beyond me. There was a complete lack of leadership. The morons instituted new rules and expected retroactive compliance. Then they opened it all up to public scrutiny. They didn’t see the truck coming. The price paid by the individuals charged is too much other than Harb who is guilty as hell on his house scam but probably nothing else.
Just heard Bob Fife on the radio blaming everyone but himself for this travesty.
And now it’s “Senator Mike Duffy: Hero of the People” at the twitter feed.
BTW, one funny tweet along the lines of “this is the best a Senator has ever done in April.”
I agree, Peter, that it was the PMO threw Duffy under the bus, and Wright immediately after. But all this happened after the MSM already had the wind in their sails and were after Duffy, Wallin et.al. anyway. What the PMO did for the Conservative Party was even worse. Those particular individuals will sell you out in a heartbeat.
Scar is also entirely correct about new rules and retroactive compliance.
Just heard Bob Fife on the radio blaming everyone but himself for this travesty.
$1m in overspending from the Senate. $2.7m pilfered from taxpayers for Dipper political uses. $30b in overspending from the Grits, and just getting started. Who really is doing the greater damage to fiscal integrity?
you guys don’t seem to get it, the desired outcome had nothing to do with partisanship, the targets were ones of opportunity and petty malice and insignificant to the program…to change the rules on an institution that could send laws back to committee and be a real brake on bad law whipped by a majority….that’s now pretty much gone…can you see any problems coming from an agenda driven charismatic leader whose only stop button is a SCC decision? If you have much faith in that check out judge in PQ who just got his job back.
“Just heard Bob Fife on the radio blaming everyone but himself for this travesty.”
Your loss and my waste of time responding.
Everyone who’s followed this Media concocted “scandal” knows perfectly well that the Media really didn’t care about the facts pertaining to this case nor did they care about Duffy personally, other than feeling angry and vengeful that Duffy wasn’t a good and loyal Liberal activist like the rest of them, nope, this was always about setting up a Media narrative to get big bad PM Harper, and it still is. So while the Media dutifully ignore the myriad of broken “promises”, questionable fund raising activities, union collusion, and radical anti Canadian agenda of the Libranos, and while the Media gleefully drop their collectivist pants to publicly pleasure themselves while their favorite celebrity Justine does cartwheels, foxy boxing, somersaults and selfies they remain “outraged” that Nigel Wright used his own money to pay back the taxpayer, as according to the Media it is Duffy and Wrights behavior, along with the behavior of any other conservative that is and will always remain the fault and responsibility of the diabolical Stephen Harper. The good news is that the Liberal Senate can now go back to behaving exactly the way they did before the Media led Duffy circus came to town comfortably knowing that the Media couldn’t care less what they do now or how they behave in the future, at least for the next ten years of Trudopian acting classes… mission accomplished. Now lets all settle down and let the unaccountable Supreme Court get back to dictating the social and economic future of the nation according to the powers granted them from the glorious Trudowe Charter while the Media take a well earned 10 year holiday…. selfies for everyone!
As usual the witch hunt ends with many dead and no witches but with a strange sense of accomplishment by those bringing the charges.
The media still do not have this right. Many are still keen to blame the PMO. The PMO may have handled the incident badly, but they were goaded into doing so by the cynical media. Many Conservative supporters at the time confirmed that they were trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill. It was another faux scandal — it was! There was never a big scandal here — but cries of “cover-up” and “bribery” were rampant. The media got it wrong — turning this into a huge dust-up when there was not much there. Nigel got Duffy to accept 90,000 to pay back the taxpayers. Duffy did not want to do this because he felt he had done nothing wrong. He had not, but Nigel’s wanting to simply deal with the issue expeditiously turned sour. The fact that the media played it for all it was worth is nothing to be proud of. It is typical of the reason why the media is viewed with cynicism. The fact that the media played into the hands of the opposition and Harper critics makes them look complicit. This was a sorry affair. The PMO looks foolish and unsophisticated — but the rest (opposition and compliant media) look like snakes.
Vaillancourt’s condemnation of the PMO was inappropriate. That is why (previously) Senators were affiliated with Parties — that is how we control Senators. They represent the Party. That is why loyal supporters are (or used to be) appointed to the Senate. They are expected to be accountable to the government that appointed them. In rare instances they could act independently, but their power does not come from voters, so as a rule they must acquiesce to Parliament. This is how it has always worked. How could Vaillancourt not know that?
Excellent comment — that should be a letter to the editor, somewhere. It is very apt and cuts to the chase of how politics in Canada operates.
Vaillancourt was supposed to rule on the Duffy case. It was not this dolts job to find (or even imply) who the “guilty” were.
When ever had we had a judge saying “I find that he didn’t steal that car … but the guys living in the corner house were up to nefarious deeds”. Like really, how can you defend yourself from this type of BS.
Judge what’s in front of you judge – or shut your piehole.
Great analysis. I agree totally. This whole mess was manufactured by the MSM to discredit Harper.
Sure they are appointed.
But being appointed, they are members of an independent institution, with its own powers.
Their use of those powers lacks inherent legitimacy, so they have to tread lightly.
Harper never understood the concept of “arms length”. Ask his elected members.
And you don’t understand the concept of “leader”. Ask anyone that has a brain.
Don’t forget that the senate killed the climate change bill thereby saving Canadians billions and billions of dollars.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/17/canadian-senate-kills-climate-change-bill/