More from Michael Harris, available More from, available here

Senator Mike Duffy has been right about one thing from the very beginning of the Senate expenses scandal: The only way to clear the air is a “full and open inquiry.”

It has perplexed a lot of people, including yours truly, that Senator Duffy insists that when all the facts come to light, his actions will not merit criticism. That is hard to imagine — but until all the facts are known, it’s not impossible. It is also worth mentioning he has not been charged with anything.

Two other people facing legal difficulties — Michael Sona, charged in the robocall scandal, and Senator Patrick Brazeau, being investigated for breach of trust involving Senate expenses, also have asked for public inquiries into their situations. The only ones who want an airing of the issues are the ones who stand accused. Odd.

The only person who could call such inquiries, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, can barely speak the names of the people at the centre of what he calls these “distractions.” Stephen Harper will donate generously to Edward Snowden’s legal defence fund before he lifts a finger to get at the facts of Duffygate, no matter what drivel to the contrary comes out of the PMO about cooperation with the police investigation.

Harper’s infamous caucus press conference about alleged fraud in the Senate was one part Pontius Pilate, one part media puppet-master. Then it was off to Peru without a single substantive word being spoken about a remarkable turn of events: His then chief-of-staff, Nigel Wright, had secretly paid off the allegedly improper expenses of one of Harper’s star Senate appointments.

It was very strange. Why wouldn’t the PM want the air cleared — even more than did Senator Duffy — to establish that neither he nor the Conservative Party of Canada had anything to do with this clandestine deal worked out by his own chief-of-staff — especially since the first plan was to repay Duffy’s expenses from a CPC fund?

Could the answer be that the deal was the brainchild of the PMO, and that Senator Duffy was forced to agree to the payback for reasons not yet known? If so, what could those reasons be?

“Maybe someone who didn’t owe anything was forced to go along with this scheme against his will,” says a player with personal knowledge of the events surrounding the Nigel Wright payment to Duffy — not for direct attribution. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if the RCMP were to question people about threats against a sitting legislator to get him to plead guilty to a non-crime for political purposes? Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

And the theory this source advances requires a word or two on the media management style of the Harper government.

Anyone who covers Parliament Hill knows that Stephen Harper has drilled the mantra into every government spokesperson: By responding to negative stories, a second negative story is produced. So if you ignore the first story, it eventually will gutter down like a fire without fuel.

So on December 3, 2012, when Glen McGregor of the Ottawa Citizen ran a story suggesting that Mike Duffy was making dubious housing claims, the senator wrote to Nigel Wright to explain that the “smear” went back to an old dispute with McGregor when he worked for Frank Magazine and Mike Duffy was with CTV. The PMO gave the standard advice: “Say nothing and the story will die.”

Except that it didn’t. At the end of January 2013, Parliament returned from the Christmas break and the story still had legs. Worse, it was not going over well with the Conservative base — key to Harper’s strategy for winning elections.

Once the PMO concluded that the story of Duffy and the others, including the conniving Mac Harb, was stoking public anger, and knowing that the Senate’s rules were inexplicable to the base, Stephen Harper may well have decided it was far too risky to defend either Duffy or the Senate.

The turmoil created by senators Duffy, Brazeau, Harb and Wallin provided the perfect opportunity to distract the base with the emotionally charged issue of Senate reform — a lot better than having to explain to social conservatives why the government was wallowing in unprecedented deficits while pet issues like abortion were being ignored.

According to the well-placed source who spoke to iPolitics on the condition of non-attribution, the decision to order Duffy to repay the Crown was not motivated by “ethical or legal considerations. It was strictly political.”

So the PM laid down the law with Duffy after a February 2013 caucus meeting: The party’s star fundraiser had to pay the expense money back — even though RCMP investigators noted in their court filings that the Deloitte audit did not fault the senator for his housing expenses.

The decision to force the Duffy repayment conferred a handy benefit on the Harper government. For years, the PM had been looking for ways to build support for Senate reform. The turmoil created by senators Duffy, Brazeau, Harb and Wallin provided the perfect opportunity to distract the base — better than having to explain to social conservatives why the government was wallowing in unprecedented deficits while pet issues like abortion were being ignored.

In a word, it was the ultimate distraction and the ultimate wedge. After all, when those young PMO staffers demonstrated against Justin Trudeau, at least one sign on the lawn of Parliament that day read ‘Justin Loves the Senate’. But as theories go, this one still leaves one very big issue unexplained: Nigel Wright.

If the PM, the PMO and the party had decided to cut Duffy loose and change the channel to Senate reform or even abolition using Duffy as the whipping-boy, why would the PM’s chief of staff give the senator a gift of over $90,000 to pay off the disputed expenses?

Even more curious, why would the original plan have been to use party funds to pay Duffy’s debt? And why would a sub-committee of the Senate’s internal economy board sanitize the audit of Senator Duffy’s expenses as reported by CTV’s Bob Fife on May 17, 2013?

These were high-risk enterprises. So why were the CPC and the PM’s chief of staff willing to risk what would be an explosive scandal if the facts leaked out, as they did on May 14, 2013? The answer that seems most likely is this: To stop an audit into Senator Duffy trailing back into the 2011 election.

In the early innings of this story, Conservative strategists took the view that if the Duffy expenses were paid back, then there would be no further reason to “review” Duffy’s expenses.

That’s the point Duffy’s lawyer made in a letter to the Deloitte auditors on March 26, 2013, the day after Nigel Wright sent the senator a bank draft for $90,172.24 through Nelligan, O’Brien, Payne LLP.

And that is exactly why Senator David Tkachuk said on May 9, 2013 that the case was closed, after the first Senate report into Duffy’s expenses re-stated that because the monies had been repaid, the Deloitte audit was now unnecessary.

If the audit could be stopped, it would cut off further embarrassment for a government that was beginning to smell of corruption. Scandals involving a handful of key Harper appointments — Bruce Carson, Arthur Porter, Dean del Mastro, Peter Penashue, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau — were beginning to take a toll.

The government also was labouring under the shadow of dirty tricks in the last election, from robocalls that had Elections Canada investigating 56 ridings where voter suppression had been alleged, to the use by the CPC in 14 Conservative campaigns of the U.S. firm Front Porch Strategies, an campaign organizing group with close ties to the Republican Party. The law is murky on whether it is legal for foreigners to campaign on the ground in a Canadian election, as Front Porch did in the campaigns of Julian Fantino and Rick Dykstra.

As the custodian of the party, Nigel Wright didn’t need to have the PM’s most important fundraiser adding to Tory problems — particularly since Duffy played such a key role in the 2011 election, campaigning for 17 Conservative candidates during the writ period and helping the Tories to their majority.

Could the party’s use of Duffy’s services during that election stand up to scrutiny? Was that the part of the story Nigel Wright’s payment was designed to bury? Is that why it was so important to change the channel? As it would later be reported, Senator Duffy was billing Conservative campaigns in Nova Scotia, the GTA, and the Northwest Territories during the election — sometimes while receiving his Senate allowance.

On June 5 and June 13, 2013, the RCMP seized records from Elections Canada for 12 Conservatives with whom Duffy campaigned, including Gerald Keddy, Greg Kerr and Joe Oliver. Immediately after those requests were made, Nigel Wright’s lawyers contacted the RCMP to say they would be sending information to the police and that their client was unaware of fraudulent expense claims allegedly made by the senator.

Last word from the source: “It’s a much nastier game than anyone knows, and the real enemies are often among your own teammates.”

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.