OTTAWA—The Mike Duffy criminal trial shifted onto damaging political ground Thursday that now has the judge reviewing Duffy’s political value — and toxicity — to the Conservative Party of Canada and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

First came damaging testimony over two days from three Conservative MPs who admitted Duffy was a popular draw recruited to their ridings for political purposes to rally partisan troops and raise money — and revelations that government ministers are used the same way.

Second came new inflammatory excerpts from PMO emails at the height of the burgeoning Senate expense scandal in 2013. The documents were filed by Duffy’s defence team. They cite an RCMP officer’s interview with a Senate witness in which he quotes a Feb. 7, 2013 email apparently written by Nigel Wright, Harper’s then chief of staff.

In it, Wright outlines a move to have Conservative Sen. David Tkachuk, chair of a subcommittee reviewing Duffy’s expenses, announce he’d seek “external legal advice” on the meaning of the terms resident and primary residence at the same time the Senate publicly announces its decision to refer the files of Duffy, Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau to an outside auditor.

“A purpose of this is to put Mike in a different bucket and to prevent him from going squirrelly in a bunch of weekend panel shows,” Wright wrote, according to the RCMP.

It will be for Judge Charles Vaillancourt to wade through all of it to decide what any of it means for Duffy’s plea of “not guilty” to 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery. That decision is a long way off.

For now, even he couldn’t help but grin at the admissions of Conservative MP Ron Cannan.

The day before, chief government whip John Duncan told the judge the “normal arrangement” was the Conservative party would pay for guest speakers such as Duffy. Duncan was one of about 70 Conservative MPs and candidates who used Duffy to plump their profile and war chests.

On Thursday, Cannan agreed. However, he told court that while Duffy was the only star senator, he was far from the only government high-flyer to be tapped to do partisan business on the public dime.

Cannan said the travel and business of government cabinet ministers is “co-ordinated” with local MPs so they can hold riding events to “maximize their (the ministers’) travel itinerary as much as possible.”

The public pays the airfare for those trips, he acknowledged.

“If they were coming for a government meeting or a meeting with an association or to do an announcement it would be part of their government travel expenses,” Cannan told Duffy’s lawyer Don Bayne.

Under cross-examination, Cannan suggested it was what all parties do, and quipped: “Every day is election period in the world of politics.

“Every day is an election day for the current government,” Bayne replied, dryly.

Bayne suggested Duffy had other important “public business” — validly expensed to the Senate under vaguely defined rules — during his June 2009 trip to the West Coast, where he appeared at Cannan’s and other political fundraisers. Cannan knew nothing of that.

But when Bayne said party fundraisers are “an opportunity” for Canadians to donate to political parties, Cannan again wisecracked: “You can donate online 365 days of the year, at Conservative.ca.”

“Never miss an opportunity,” said Judge Charles Vaillancourt, smiling.

It was confirmation, as the Star reported, that advice contained in the party’s 2015 re-election plan is being followed. That document urged MP’s and staffers to leverage the presence of ministers who appear in their ridings, saying for regional organizers it is an “opportunity to go meet minister, shake hands and take a picture.”

The second theatrical coup for the defence came with a strategic leak of documents not yet raised in court that were reported in the Globe and Mail, and prompted the opposition to lead off question period with embarrassing questions about the extent of the PMO’s attempts to whitewash the impact of an outside audit of Duffy’s expenses back in 2013.

The documents were filed by Duffy’s defence team in a bid to have findings by the Senate’s internal audit subcommittee introduced at Duffy’s trial. They are records of police interviews with witnesses, and they flesh out a picture already known about a government in damage control. However, they tease out more juicy details about the extent to which the PMO worked to stop residency questions faced by Duffy from blowing up into a crisis over the constitutional eligibility of the longtime Ottawa resident to hold a senate seat representing Prince Edward Island.

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Based on two separate RCMP interviews with former Senate clerk Gary O’Brien and a Senate staffer Jill Anne Joseph, the documents suggest top officials in Stephen Harper’s office were behind changes made to a draft report of Deloitte’s audit into Duffy’s housing expenses. Under the direction of Tkachuk and Sen. Carolyn Stewart Olsen two damaging paragraphs were deleted, the interviews say.

The documents show a senior Senate staffer, Jill Anne Joseph, was skeptical about the clarity of Senate rules on residency. She conducted the Senate’s own internal review that asked senators to produce four documents such as a health card or driver’s licence to prove the location of their primary residence. She spoke of her futile attempts to argue “there was a lack of clear criteria surrounding residency.”

The documents also show O’Brien fought with senators to ensure audits were professional, proper procedures were followed, and that “before we threw anybody to the wolves we wanted a chance to look at it internally, give the senators in question a chance to be heard.”

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