Wobbly Morals - the Mike Duffy Trial

It is hard to imagine any political junkie in Canada who was not waiting with some anticipation to Justice Charles Vaillancourt's ruling on the thirty-one charges against Senator Mike Duffy. I suspect that most of those observers were more than a bit surprised when Duffy was found not guilty on all of those charges.

Generally speaking criminal trials are about whether or not the person committed the act. The exceptions to this are when the trial is about whether or not the person was sane when the act was committed or whether or not the person had a legitimate reason (e.g. afraid for their life or property). The Duffy defence did not suggest that he had not committed the acts that he was charged with. There was no real debate as to either the amount of money that was taken from the public coffers or how it was spent. The only real question was whether or not Duffy by doing so - had with intent committed a criminal offense. The judge said no. By stating that there were no “sinister motive”(Globe and Mail) in Duffy's action, Duffy was absolved from all wrong doing.

The judge, perhaps without any authority to do so, did criticize in rather harsh language a number of the other players in the long dragged out drama. Comments such as "“The political, covert and relentless, unfolding of events is mind-boggling and shocking......The precision and planning of the exercise would make any military commander proud” (Globe and Mail) are a harsh and hopefully embarrassing condemnations  of the PMO and others within the political power structures of Ottawa. The over-all tone of the 306 page judgement is that Mike Duffy is not guilty because he listened to and followed (some would say coerced into) the advice of people who were in a position of trust and power. Duffy's defence was that he was when he was not sure about some of the rules  - he asked for advice. He then followed the directions he was given. When, for example, he questioned whether or not he could be a Senator from PEI - because he knew he was at best only an occasional visitor to that province- he was told to ignore the rules. He did so and promptly claimed living expenses while in Ottawa.

Justice Charles Vaillancourt's ruling makes it clear that according to the law - Duffy's action cannot be called criminal. That Duffy was not guilty of any of the things he was charged with either because the rules were unclear or he was shown that it was okay to bend what few rules there are. It seems to me that the judge while stating that all of the decisions that Duffy made were not good ones, he had sought advice and therefore cannot be held accountable for following that advice.

Balderdash!!! There were a series of trials in the late 1940s in Nuremberg, Germany that clearly argued that an individual was responsible for their actions regardless of what their superiors told them to do. By the time someone gets to be appointed to the senate, one would have hoped that the individual would have grown a sufficiently strong backbone to do what is morally right as opposed to following the direction of political hacks and their sycophant followers.