Prime Minister Stephen Harper left Canadians in the dark when he was grilled in Parliament about the festering Senate expense scandal before the Commons rose for the summer. He could have told us more, much more, but he didn’t. And what he did tell us turns out to be dubious, at best.

Now Harper is planning a cabinet shuffle that he hopes will restore some lustre to his discredited government.

But the truth will out. As the Star’s Joanna Smith reports from Ottawa, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police criminal investigation has shed light on matters that Harper wasn’t keen to share with Parliament and the public. Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats are saying that Harper has “wilfully misled Canadians” in this affair, and it’s easy to see why.

Harper told Parliament that both he and his staff in the Prime Minister’s Office were out of the loop when former chief of staff Nigel Wright decided to quietly cut Sen. Mike Duffy a cheque for $90,172 to pay back improperly claimed expenses. The decision was “not communicated to me or to members of my office,” Harper said. Certainly, it would have been easy enough to find out who in the PMO may have known, just by asking.

The RCMP reports that Wright recalls telling three people in the PMO: David van Hemmen, Wright’s executive assistant; Chris Woodcock, director of issues management; and Benjamin Perrin, a former PMO lawyer. He also told Sen. Irving Gerstein, who chairs the Conservative Fund Canada, the party’s fundraising arm.

In Parliament Harper also shrugged off demands that he produce the cheque and related documents. Thanks to the RCMP we know that Wright sent money to Duffy’s lawyer via a CIBC bank draft for $90,172.24 on March 25, on condition that Duffy immediately pay back what he owed and stop talking to the media about it.

Finally, Harper told Parliament that Wright offered the money to spare the taxpayers. Wright “wanted to see the taxpayers recompensed for expenses that we all believed were inappropriate,” Harper told the Commons on May 29. Earlier, his communications director Andrew MacDougall said “the government believes that taxpayers should not be on the hook for improper expense claims made by senators.” Repeatedly, Canadians were told that no government or Conservative party funds went to Duffy.

But thanks to the RCMP we now know that the Conservative Fund Canada was prepared to repay what Duffy owed when they thought it was $32,000, but $90,000 was deemed too much to ask the fund to cover. That appears to shatter two fictions: that Wright’s offer was a spontaneous act of personal generosity, and that it was all about making sure taxpayers weren’t on the hook.

In fact, it looks like a Plan B to extricate Duffy from a problem. And had the Tory fund stepped in, taxpayers would indeed have been “on the hook” insofar as political parties benefit from per-vote taxpayer subsidies, and donations that are subsidized by tax credits. The RCMP documents note as well that Wright’s lawyers indicated that part of his role was to “deal with matters that could cause embarrassment” to the Conservative party.

This is no private, isolated matter between Wright and Duffy. It reaches deep into the PMO and into the party.

And it has left the RCMP believing that the Wright/Duffy agreement was part of a deal to see that a Senate committee probing Duffy’s improper expenses would go easier on him, “constituting an offence of frauds on the government.”

Given the gravity of all this, Harper had a duty to tell Parliament all that he knew or could reasonably have found out. He could have found out that the Conservative Fund was prepared to step in and help, but didn’t. He could have found out that Sen. Gerstein and three members of PMO knew of Wright’s offer. He could have tabled the bank draft. He didn’t have to float the fiction that Wright had only the taxpayer in mind.

Instead, he stonewalled Parliament and misled the public. It will take more than a cabinet shuffle to restore trust in this government.

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