As the Mike Duffy trial wheezes and puffs its way through a second week, it’s apparent that whether the senator from PEI committed fraud, breach of trust or bribery is possibly just not that relevant.
The trial, it’s becoming clear, will largely turn on technical points about what’s allowed, what was spelled out and what has been tacitly understood regarding expenses in the chamber of sober second thought.
The larger message so far, however, is that whatever Mike Duffy helped himself to, and however he accomplished that, he was but an extreme example of a well established tradition.
Rules surrounding issues such as what senators can bill to the public are largely non-existent, we learned.
The start of the trial has been instructive in — if nothing else — showing the rest of the country outside Ottawa how the world of partisan politics there operates.
In this world, money funnelled by Duffy to a company run by a friend to act as a slush fund for expenses might not be considered that shocking.
It’s a world of entitlement, where the idea that someone might pay for an expense themselves — rather than billing it to the rest of us — would be more likely to be met with shock and awe.
Rather than a house of careful re-consideration, the Senate has been revealed as a place where the partisan faithful get rewarded. They’re handed the plum job of doing still more partisan heavy lifting — all without an apparent shred of real oversight and all on the taxpayer’s dime.
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