Currently, the PMO spin machine is dismissing all of the incendiary e-mails referred to in last week’s RCMP affidavit on the Wright/Duffy scandal. According to that machine, all that matters is the one passage confirming the Prime Minister was unaware of the $90,000 personal cheque. Amazingly, the PMO is so insular that it would seem they actually believe the document exonerates the Prime Minister.

On the matter of the $90,000 cheque, the PM’s ignorance appears to be confirmed. But this story ceased to be about Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy weeks ago. As salacious as a millionaire paying the ineligible debts of a now-expelled Senator might be, the bigger story is what their transaction (and who knew or didn’t know what and when) says about how business is conducted in Ottawa.

Section 119 of the Criminal Code makes it an indictable offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison to offer or accept “any money [or] valuable consideration” to a Member of Parliament “in respect of anything done or omitted […] in their official capacity.”

Accordingly, if someone offered a sitting legislator $90,000 in exchange for his co-operation in sanitizing a report by a Senate Committee on an independent audit into that very legislator’s housing expenses, it could certainly qualify as criminal.

But since the Prime Minister has established, at the very least, plausible deniability of his involvement in all but the “broadest of terms” of that transaction, the legal question is secondary at this point.

What is more relevant and more threatening to our democracy is that the executive was interfering and attempting to micromanage the Senate — a body that exists to provide an independent check on government, not to be a PMO branch plant.

The Prime Minister’s Office was heavily involved in this operation. The February 22 e-mails, wherein Wright, then the chief of staff, appears to seek the PM’s approval for a scheme to have the Conservative Party reimburse Duffy’s expenses (then estimated at $32,000) and a subsequent confirmation (“good to go from the PM”) are particularly troubling.

It appears the plan was run by and approved by the Prime Minister. As a Member of the Conservative Party, I actually find the prospect of the party paying these ineligible expenses more troubling than Wright paying them. Moreover, the fact that the plan was subsequently halted may not insulate those who made the “offer” from prosecution under section 119.

The Prime Minister’s response in Question Period that he was “good to go” with Duffy repaying the expenses himself is illogical. Such an obviously proper course of conduct would not have required the approval of the PM.

The PM’s personal credibility is further eroded by his imprecise recollection of the days following the breaking of the story. The PM has stated several times that upon hearing of the cheque he took immediate action. But for several days in May, the entire PMO spin establishment had “full confidence in Mr. Wright.” The PMO is still unclear as to whether Wright was ultimately fired or if he resigned.

The most damaging inconsistency in the PM’s own spin is his insistence, for weeks last spring, that Nigel Wright had “acted alone.” We now know that at least a dozen PMO or Conservative Party insiders were aware of some aspect of this toxic transaction.

What are we to make of a Prime Minister who upon learning that Wright had just cut a possibly illegal check to a sitting legislator, did not call his entire inner circle together to find out what was going on and who was involved? Is it plausible that the Prime Minister was so uninterested in this huge public relations crisis that he didn’t even make an effort to correct his misunderstanding that Wright flew rogue and solo?

It appears that for months there was a complete institutional failure inside the Prime Minister’s inner circle. Is departed staffer Christopher Montgomery really the only person with enough acumen to appreciate the ethical and legal boundaries that were being crossed?

The entire system of checks and balances inside the Ottawa Bubble completely broke down. It is possible that a culture of moral indifference and general incompetence exists inside Langevin Block. If so, that culture was nurtured under this Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is responsible constitutionally for the operation, ethical standards and general competence of his own office. He is the PM in PMO.

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Either the Prime Minister’s honesty or his competence as a manager of his own office is under siege. At this point, it is far from clear to me which scenario is worse.

Brent Rathgeber is an Independent Member of Parliament for Edmonton-St. Albert.

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