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It may not be Rumpole of the Bailey, but the Perils of the Puffster are making one thing crystal clear: Stephen Harper has become a law unto himself.

The evidence from the near past is damning enough: Found in contempt of Parliament; breaking his own elections law; sending unconstitutional legislation to the Supreme Court; passing retroactive laws to make the illegal legal; publicly attacking the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; forcing out Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commissioner for following the statute governing her agency; dumping the Parliamentary Budget Officer for correcting the government’s false program costings; usurping some of the constitutional functions of the Governor-General; and passing legislation to punish political enemies such as unions and environmentalists.

The most recent evidence of Harper’s unrestrained overreach oozed out of the Duffy trial. Only a leader with a sense of narcissistic exceptionalism could send a senior PMO staffer (and now campaign worker), to engage in a conversation with a sworn witness during a recess at a criminal trial. After all, Harper and his own office are smack in the middle of this evidentiary mud bath. What’s next, a visit to the judge’s chambers?

Sending Nick Koolsbergen to court was not a gaffe. It was not like confusing an Atlantic and Pacific salmon for PR purposes during a political campaign. Whatever its species, this fish stinks from the head. The Globe and Mail described Koolsbergen Does Court with the image of firemen dragging more kindling to the blaze. Nice.

I call the conversation in the courtroom corridor between the PM’s new issues manager and Chris Woodcock the death march of contempt for the justice system. To Harper, this court is just another political problem to be managed, another process to be manipulated like his PMO henchmen manipulate everything else. Remember, these guys think the words “force” and “persuade” are synonyms. One can only conclude that they are auditioning for a part in a remake of Goodfellas.

If I had to pick the major take-away from Sen. Mike Duffy’s trial to this point, it would be all the evidence showing that the PMO has become a rogue operation out to subvert and politicize all other once-independent institutions and agencies of government — the Senate, the Nuclear Safety Commission, the RCMP, the courts, the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Privy Council, and what’s left of the CBC.

Nigel Wright and the PM are on the record saying that Duffy’s expenses are probably technically within the rules. So why has he been heaved into the wood-chipper? Woodcock, the PM’s former issues manager, testified that the reason was that Duffy was the senator most often in the media.

Was Duffy’s offence to the criminal code or the Harper political play book?

It is rather like Garth Turner, who earned the PM’s wrath by being too vocal in the media. Garth blew his chance for an appointment from Harper by committing the cardinal sin; speaking his mind so frequently he wasn’t even a candidate for re-education camp.

Woodcock is lucky that Donald Bayne didn’t press him on his explanation that with 800 to 1000 emails a day, he just didn’t have time to read a seven-liner from the boss. Woodcock is lucky that Donald Bayne didn’t press him on his explanation that with 800 to 1000 emails a day, he just didn’t have time to read a seven-liner from the boss.

Unless media appearances are undertaken as the PM’s sock puppets, as with independents Paul Calandra, Pierre Poilievre and Chris Alexander, they are not just unwanted, they are punished. All too often with Harper, it is a case of not guilty as falsely charged but punished anyway. Just ask Helena Guergis, Linda Keene, Kevin Page and a group of other abused public figures so big they are now, as Michael Sona put it to me, a voting block.

Woodcock may not have been as dramatic in his evidence as the PM’s former legal counsel, Benjamin Perrin. But he did supply some comic relief to a deadly serious proceeding. He is asking the court to believe that he didn’t read a seven-line email from Nigel Wright clearly telling him about Wright’s $90,000 cheque to Senator Duffy — the hottest potato the PMO then had on the issues manager’s plate. It apparently took him several months to catch the play.

Would you want Woody managing your issues? No wonder those watching were snickering in the courtroom.

Think about it: unless Woodcock can’t actually read, how do you miss the punch-line in a seven-line note on one of the most pressing issues facing the PMO at the time? Or did he just disregard it because it came from such an unimportant man as the PM’s chief-of-staff and Woodcock’s immediate boss? Or because it was the issue that might blow up the Tory base — the Duffy expense scandal?

Woodcock is lucky that Donald Bayne didn’t press him on his explanation that he just didn’t have time to read a seven-liner from the boss.

I wonder what would have happened had Bayne asked him to produce all the other emails he received on March 8, 2013 — the date of Wright’s terse note personally informing Woodcock that he, Wright, was taking care of Duffy’s expenses himself? How many did Woodcock actually get, and how many of those did he bother reading?

Woodcock could of course make the argument that in order to land a job in Harper’s PMO, it was a requirement not to read emails from the boss and to leave meetings just as critical information was being imparted. After all, the PM’s current chief of staff, Ray Novak, is also an advocate of the Sgt. Schultz school of good defence. “I know nothing … no-thing.”

Woodcock inadvertently gave Canadians an insight into the blank-screen amorality at the heart of Harper’s political operation. He admitted to being ethically uncomfortable about “locking in” the Deloitte audit as part of the plan to contain the Duffy expense scandal. But when Bayne asked him if he’d said anything about those ethical misgivings, he replied no. Why would he?

Woodcock said he didn’t have the slightest problem with crafting those political lies known in Harperland as “communications lines” to make it appear that Duffy was repaying the money. This is a say-anything-do-anything crowd. Don’t forget, Nigel Wright himself divided lies into good and bad “misrepresentations”.

To them, there are clearly important and unimportant deceptions. How are Canadians to trust people like that?

The real trouble for this tandem of “kids in short pants” and their former boss is one Benjamin Perrin. Harper’s former legal counsel in the PMO has testified in no uncertain terms that Novak was present when the financial arrangement that saw Wright personally pay back Duffy’s expenses was discussed. Wright also sent Novak an email about the arrangement, but of course he didn’t read it. They apparently didn’t read emails from the chief-of-staff back in the day Wright held that position.

The takeaway: The entire Wright/Duffy Affair has been riddled with lies from top to bottom.

The Senate itself abdicated its responsibility to get to the bottom of its own — and the PMO’s — scheming in this matter. It did that by declining to bring Sen. Irving Gerstein and Deloitte partner Michael Runia to testify before a committee to give evidence of just what they discussed, what interventions were proposed by Gerstein, and what Deloitte ultimately did and didn’t do.

Thanks to the Senate’s moral inertia, it will be up to the court to discover the truth.

When this justice interruptus begins again in November, the only chance the court will have of doing its job is by bringing all the key witnesses to testify. In my books, that means Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton, Gerstein, Novak, Patrick Rogers, David van Hemmen, and a raft of Senate representatives including Marjory LeBreton, Carolyn Stewart Olsen, David Tkachuk, and George Furey. It also means hearing from Dan Hilton, who used to run the CPC, and RCMP investigator Greg Horton to discuss how you can have a bribe taker without a bribe maker.

And yes, and perhaps most obviously, it’s time the world hears from Prime Minister Stephen Harper — under oath.

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