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OTTAWA — Mike Duffy, the suspended senator now on trial here on fraud, breach of trust and bribery charges, is fighting like a mad dog for his job — oh, his reputation and name too, of course, but also the job he’d coveted for so long.

This was so well-known on Parliament Hill, where Duffy worked as a broadcaster for years, that when in his maiden speech in the Red Chamber he said, “It is not a position I sought,” people reportedly fell about laughing.

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Now, the trial itself is threatening to become a one-witness affair. Duffy’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, spent a second consecutive day cross-examining the former Senate law clerk, Mark Audcent, who was less than an hour in his examination-in-chief.

(Audcent might have much to spill, but his dealings with senators, including Duffy, are protected by solicitor-client privilege, so his evidence is of a general nature.)

In Bayne’s effort to show the Senate was a lawless place with such an absence of rules that his client couldn’t possibly have broken any, Thursday he presented Audcent with all manner of irrelevant acts (the Immigration & Refugee Protection Act, the Highway Traffic Act, the Adoption Acts of two provinces) and regulations to show that when governments want to define terms such as “principal residence,” they can and do.