We now know it is highly unlikely that the PM was unaware of the Duffy bribery scandal that was being conducted from the PMO (hell, Harper was the person who probably gave the orders).
However an interesting video is making rounds that highlights Jim Flaherty’s reaction when Harper lied to Parlement on the role his personal staffers had in bribing Duffy.
This Duffy scandal is confusing to me. Let me break it down as I understand it:
Duffy has claimed expenses he was not entitled to, to the tune of $90,000.
This is seen as a potential political embarrassment and the government would like the story to go away. Having Duffy pay his expenses back immediately seems to be the solution the government desires.
Now here’s the part I don’t get: a senior aide to the Prime Minister whips out his checkbook and personally covers Duffy’s 90k.
When, where, why and how did that become a good idea? Who cares if it takes Duffy the rest of his life to pay his own expenses back? Who cares if there’s a news story every six months about a deadbeat ex-senator who was kicked out for racking up debts? Why was it that this money had to be paid back in full immediately at great peril to the person who did it? And most importantly, how do I steal $90k from the government and then have the government insist on paying it back for me?!
If Harper DIDN’T give the orders it would be basically the only thing that ever happened under his watch that wasn’t directed by him. What a remarkably convenient thing that would be.
I agree with DWMarch that the Duffy scandal is a really weird one. I can’t exactly tell if what Wright et al. did was a crime, or even all that wrong. But as with Watergate, the real scandal is the coverup. As Andrew Coyne asked today, if this isn’t a scandal, why did they try to hide it? Why lie? Just because they were embarrassed?
I think they wanted it handled quickly because the real issue the Conservatives wanted gone was Duffy expense accounting his party work. The primary residence part was getting centre stage but it was the other stuff making the PMO nervous. “Here’s the money. Stop investigating now!”.
My understanding is the expenses would have been paid out of the Conservative Party funds if the amount was $30,000.00. That it was 3x that amount is when the staffer decided to whip out his cheque book. I think the very idea of contemplating expenses to be re-paid from party funds in the first place is violating the public trust. The cover up of allowing a staffer to us his personal funds is trouble. My question is Are there other irregular expenses being covered by either the campaign or staffers willing to fall on their sword ? How much did the PM know? That video seems to suggest that Flaherty believed the PM knew far more than what he said, and that what he said during Question Period was a lie.
Does anyone else have trouble believing that writing a cheque for $90,000 to make a work problem go away is bizarre? I find it incredible that he was not either expecting to be reimbursed, himself, or to have one hell of a quid prō quō.
Absolutely underhanded and bizarre. Of course Walker expected reimbursement, it’s a huge quid pro quo and goes directly to heart of the matter. As an un-elected official what he does to affect policy and how he obtains his authority is under the directive of the Prime Minister. If the PM is allowing a staffer to run roughshod over the public trust, then the country has a problem. We expect transparency from our elected officials.
My understanding is that Nigel Wright is personally very wealthy and was not expecting reimbursement.
And pigs fly. People are wealthy precisely because they live by the adage that nothing is free.
I’m aware that that is what he says. Have you ever met a wealthy person who was cavalier about large amounts of money? I haven’t, and I don’t believe they exist. In my experience, the only reason wealthy people give up that much money is:
It was pointed out to me today that some parts of the Green Party’s platform on family issues are suspiciously similar to stuff cribbed from “Men’s Rights Advocacy” literature, and indeed the Greens have run militant MRAs as candidates.
It’s funny how a lot of people see the Green Party as kind of a noble outsider. They’re nothing of the sort; it’s a shitty political party with an incoherent Mickey Mouse platform and a leader whose mission in life is living on taxpayer money.
Not that I’m disagreeing with you but could you point those out to me?
Shared parenting as opposed to alienation? It’s a move in the right direction. The tender years doctrine was tossed by the courts years ago, but in practice it is alive and well.
At this point, the Green Party offers something that the NDP, Conservatives and Liberals do not offer: responsible government. When an MP votes in Parliament in accordance with the wishes of the people in his or her riding, that’s responsible government. When an MP votes in Parliament in accordance with his or her party’s whipped vote despite it being against the wishes of the people in his or her riding, that is not responsible government. Pierre Eliot Trudeau called backbenchers “nobodies,” Harper’s MPs tow the party line, and the NDP lost an MP to the Greens solely due to this reason (ironically, the NDP has now taken up the position that the MP they lost had held).
Do you want your MP to represent you and be responsible to you and the other people in your riding, or do you want your MP to represent the party line and be responsible to the party’s leader. That is one of the two greatest differences between the Green Party of Canada and the three major parties. The other is that the Green Party has little structural base, so it is no surprise that it has some oddballs running. As the party grows and matures, the ratio of good candidates (e.g. the NDP MP who crossed the floor to the Greens, or Trudeau’s daughter who is now running Green) to nutters will settle down to something similar to that of the other major parties. As it stands,the Green platform is on the web, and it’s quite reasonable, particularly with regard to family law.
Specifically, the Greens wish to remodel the Divorce Act on BC’s Family Law Act. The Divorce Act offers custody, joint custody (which is rarely ordered in contested cases), or access. The BC Family Law Act is much more attenuated to the needs of the child in that it gets into tailoring parenting plans involving parental responsibilities, parenting time and contact. It’s a direction that needs to be taken, and has its roots in a major report put out by a Liberal senator and a Liberal MP under Cretien called “For the Sake of the Children” which informally has been adopted by the judiciary as a policy guideline. Unfortunately, in the seventeen years since the report came out, the Divorce Act has not been overhauled to bring it in line with policy.
The other issue pertaining to family law that the Greens want to change is the excessively adversarial nature of family law that results in excessive, expensive and interminable litigation that destroys child, parents, and the parents’ finances (for example, yesterday I settled a truly nasty family matter in which the kids were being bounced about; today I settled another matter in which the parents have been fighting over custody and access for over a decade; tomorrow I’m in court over a matter in which the parents are still fighting over a twelve year old in a case that started when the child was one year old; next week I’m in court over a matter that started when the kid was a toddler and who will be getting his driver’s licence in less than a year). Quite simply, we need to find a better way. You’ll be hard pressed to find a Canadian family lawyer who is not very concerned about the emotional and financial cost of litigation, and in particular the toll it takes on the kids. Note that it’s not that any one party is against a revamp; it’s that there is so much going on in Parliament and the ministry, and there has been such a focus in the Harper regime in cutting back on government spending in its ministries and in social services, that repairing the Divorce Act has got lost in the wash, such that now it happens that the Greens want to step up to the plate and deal with the problem.
You know, I’m a feminist with a master’s thesis in victimization and all that, and I practice what I preach for a living as a family lawyer. And yet I can’t find a whiff of Father’s Rights in the Green platform. What I see is an attempt to put children first, which requires that neither parent be alienated from maintaining a parental relationship with their kids, which in turn is dependent upon both parents having as much direct involvement in daily parenting as is practicable given their circumstances. That’s not fathers’ rights or mothers’ rights – that’s simply doing right by the kids. Call it children’s rights to have real parents when it is practicable, not just one real parent and another relegated to being a play parent.
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So, Canadians can’t even come to visit the USA anymore? Wow, that’s kind of extreme, eh?
(I mean, I assume. We have a lot of terrorist organizations.)
As a separated parent I thought that’s what the vast majority of parents did: put the children first. Do we need more legislation in this area? I mean, if one parent isn’t interested in raising his or her kids how do we force that through law?
Good god, that’s atrocious (and runs contrary to what I have seen from their leader’s writings and speeches, and what I know through a friendship with their other MP and through a few years of board work with another one of their candidates). Thanks, foolsguinea, for posting it. Such are the problems of bootstrapping a political party. They won’t develop as a party if they don’t pay closer attention to whom they are running for candidates, and to what they put out before the public as being party policy. I’m glad they moved on it quickly, for there is none of that crap what so ever in their platform as it is presently published on the net. Their lack of a well established structure is weighing them down. I hope they learn their lesson from this and don’t repeat it.
The vast majority of parents put their kids first and do not need to go to court unless they want a divorce, which is only a matter of filling out a few forms for a judge to rubber stamp. Nor is there a problem in the courts for a parent who isn’t interested in raising his or her kids, provided that appropriate child support is paid to the person who is raising those kids.
The big problem arises when each party believes that he or she and not the other party knows what’s best for the kids, but one of them simply doesn’t know what’s best for the kids, or they are unable to work together despite both knowing what’s best for the kids. The existing Divorce Act is somewhat effective at dealing with the former (just get interim custody and guidelines child support at the git go, and stay the course while the case drags out, which while getting to the right final court order is still emotionally and financially devastating on the family), but not so good at dealing with the latter, for without recourse to a whole bunch of stuff to help sort things out, court becomes a bit of a meat-grinding groundhog day, with the same parents fighting over the same issues over and over and over and over and over and over . . . while the kids grow up as the fodder while the wheels of justice slowly grind.
What do I mean by a whole bunch of stuff to sort things out? I mean extra-judicial tools that can be used to deal with the matters directly or can be used to help the judges make better decisions. In family matters, judges are faced with evidence that most of the time is just “he said, she said” with sweet bugger all to indicate what the actual truth is. Something that has been tremendously helpful in Ontario under Ontario law (we almost always run a parallel custody claim under Ontario law when we run a custody claim under Federal divorce law) is the use of a neutral clinical investigator (usually a senior children’s social worker, but I’ve also seen BC use a child psychologist) sometimes working in conjunction with a lawyer representing the kids. The clinical investigator looks into the family in depth and drafts an expert report that is filed with the court. Usually this is enough for the parties to help the parties start seeing things a bit more clearly, such that they can settle the matter, and when it is not enough to result in a settlement, the clinical investigator’s report is used as an expert’s report by the court at trial, giving the judge a great deal more insight into both the underlying facts and the parenting options reasonably available than if the judge were limited just to “he said, she said.” Then to shorten the duration of litigation and to reduce the frequency of repeat customers, resources need to be made available for ongoing counselling and mediation of issues that crop up. To put it another way, when parents find themselves in court fighting over custody, there is most likely something psychologically out of whack with one or the other or both of them, and the social work/psychology/psychiatry fields are far better at sorting it out and getting the separated family moving forward than a judge who for the most part is limited to smacking down one or the other or both of the parents. By putting a whole bunch of stuff such as this in place, parties are better able to deal with their issues and either avoid court in the first place or settle the matter earlier on during litigation, and the judge will be in a far better position to make good decisions due to being far better informed of the underlying facts and far better advised of the possible outcomes.
Think of it this way. When someone is mentally ill, who is going to do a better job at helping them move on through life? A skilled social worker/psychologist/psychiatrist, or a judge? My guess is that it’s probably not the judge. Well here’s the thing about family litigation: usually one parent or the other both are mentally unbalanced to some degree to the point that it is buggering up the ability of the parties to make sound parenting decisions. So who is going to do a better job at helping them move through life with respect to parenting? A judge? Well, if your only tool is a hammer, then the only solution will be to use the hammer. When it comes to kids and the judicial system, I’d prefer if we try to limit as far as practicable the use of the judicial hammer, particularly since kids get often get crushed during litigation.
Here are half a dozen very common examples of what ends up being litigated. 1. A young mother believes that she is by far the only person who can parent the child because that child is hers, so she moves heaven and earth to prevent the father from being involved in the child’s life. 2. Parents share parenting with one of them having the kids a bit over 40% of the time and the other having the kids a bit under 40% of the time, with both having almost the same expenses relating to the kids (housing, transportation, food, clothing, etc.), such that the one with just over 40% must pay full blown child support to the other and the one just under 40% not having to pay any child support to the former, despite it being in the best interest of the kids to be equally provided for at both homes. 3. A father thinks he knows best when it comes to parenting despite his only being a play dad or an actual bad dad, so when he doesn’t get his way, he takes it out on the mother by withholding child support and running the matter back into court. 4. One of the parents is physically or emotionally abusive to the other parent, or both are physically or emotionally abusive to each other, with the kids living and learning in such an environment and being pawns in the power games being waged by one or both parents. 6. Either or both of the parents have psychological, alcohol or drug problems that result in a chaotic life that frustrates effective post separation parenting, and frustrates the court process. (This is why Turkey season, from Canadian Thanksgiving to Christmas, is the busiest time for family law litigators, for that’s when dysfunctional parents metaphorically fight over who gets the bigger part of the wishbone, only it is the kids who get torn apart in the simple disputes that start over who has the kids for a holiday dinner on what day and then spirals out of control into all out wars including police calls, child protection involvement and emergency motions at court – there’s nothing like traditional family occasions to bring out the very worst in unstable parents.) These examples, along with a huge self-represented litigant problem, are truly reflective of what is clogging up our courts (and yes, family matters are the brunt of the court system), and each and every one of them (including the self-represented litigant problem) is usually better handled when appropriate extra-judicial tools are used.
Think of it this way. Most judges are very smart, very hard working, very experienced at the law, and deeply care about making the best decisions possible in the best interests of the children, but their hands are tied behind their backs (a) when they are required to make decisions based on “he said, she said” evidence that may or may not be true to a greater or lesser degree (a.k.a. garbage in, garbage out), and (b) when the statute law requires a cookie cutter, one-size fits all, approach even if it is not what would be best in a particular case. Revising the Divorce Act, including putting in place extra-judicial tools, will help judges make better decisions, will reduce the duration of the cases they handle, and will divert matters that otherwise would end up in court.
Keep in mind that in family law, no one wins in court – one side or the other may not lose as much, but everyone loses, so resolving issues without going to court, and getting faster and more nuanced decisions at court are important on-going goals in family law. Revising the Divorce Act is part of getting there.
All too familiar. Family law is not my favourite area of practice, but I have been able to do it. Sounds like you can do it extremely well. I’m always willing to learn more; maybe we should talk.
Perhaps the question is, where did Nigel Wright get the money to cover the tab? Did he write a personal cheque? If so, then isn’t he abusing a salary provided to him by taxpayers? Just how much does he get paid thy writing a $90,000 personal cheque to cover expenses is no big deal? That’s more than a year’s gross salary for most people.