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It is a fascinating case Mike Duffy’s lawyer is attempting to present in that Ottawa courtroom. The senator could not have broken Senate rules on spending because there are no Senate rules on spending. “Senate business” is whatever business a senator does. A senator’s primary residence is wherever he says it is.

His driver’s licence may be from Ontario, his health card may be from Ontario, he may pay his taxes in Ontario, the house in Prince Edward Island he supposedly lives in may not even be winterized, but if he says he’s from P.E.I., he’s from P.E.I., and is entitled to claim a monthly allowance for expenses incurred “travelling” to and from the house in suburban Ottawa he has inhabited for many years. Because the rules don’t explicitly say that he can’t, and nobody else in the Senate’s apparently deserted corridors told him he couldn’t. I was just following disorders.

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Whether this will allow Duffy to escape jail we shall see. It certainly can’t have helped in the court of public opinion: even by the impossibly lax standards of the Senate (about which the auditor general will inform us later this spring) he seems to have set new records. What his defence has gone a long way to establish, however, is how much of what the senator was up to was the product of a broader political culture. Indeed it was arguably a part of his job description.