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And what is even that trauma compared to what he endured earlier, behind the scenes: blackmailed into accepting the $90,000, with the threat that if he did not take the money he had repeatedly demanded he would not get it.* For months he was obliged to remain silent while the most senior figures in the Conservative government furiously attempted to whiten his good name: rewriting a Senate committee report, attempting to tamper with an outside audit, pretending to the public that Duffy had repaid his expenses himself, all with a view to avoiding any suggestion that he had knowingly done wrong. To this day he must live with the stigma of being forced to publicly acknowledge he “may have made a mistake” in claiming his unwinterized cottage in PEI as his principal residence, though to date he has been spared the stigma of having to repay any of it.

This is a moment for all Canadians to reflect. What has happened to us? What have we become that we should so cruelly mistreat this dedicated public servant? Not since Brian Mulroney was forced to pay taxes years late on the $300,000 in cash he had secretly taken from an international arms dealer and lied about under oath has there been such a travesty of justice.

As Duffy says, this is not about Duffy. Rather, it raises “questions which go to the heart of a democracy.” After all, if sitting legislators are to be forbidden from taking tens of thousands of dollars under the table from the prime minister’s chief of staff in return for colluding in a scheme to suppress a matter of some embarrassment to the government, namely their own questionable expense claims, it will be impossible to get good people to go into public life.

*Duffy’s claim that he was threatened with the loss of his Senate seat appears to be at best a misunderstanding, especially given the strenuous efforts by senior Conservatives, well documented in the email chains, to assure themselves that no such outcome was likely. As indeed it was not: the constitutional requirement is only that a senator be “resident” in the province he represents; the location of his “principal residence” is relevant only for purposes of claiming the housing allowance.