Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
Mike Duffy broadcast from the foyer immediately outside the House of Commons, impressive as a set for his TV show, but also highly convenient as a place for ministers and other prominent politicians to get wired with a microphone and slide onto a stool in front of the camera. Like a P.E.I. lobster fisherman with a procession of fine specimens entering his well-placed trap, Duffy was easily able to catch worthy interviewees and dispatch over the country’s airwaves a steady stream of live insider reports on the politics of the nation. Despite many setbacks, he’d determinedly engineered himself into the position he had aspired to from boyhood. The people he interviewed were the players who moved the country’s government and shook our politics, but the fact they would come and go on the TV screen while Mike Duffy’s was the constantly recurring face gave him national recognition and clout in political Ottawa.
As one who intermittently had a Duffy “interview,” I was seduced by his easy-going manner of questions, his rounded face that seemed uncharacteristic of television personalities, and his unthreatening manner. An Ontarian, I was acclimatized to an earnest approach to all issues, no matter how large or small. Duffy’s “down home” style reflected Prince Edward Island’s more relaxed manner and the Island’s down-to-earth dialogue. Off Parliament Hill and across Canada, the man’s pleasing ways accounted for Duffy’s enduring appeal. Television viewers found him as easy to take as comfort food. He was disarming. His enthusiasm was contagious. The twinkle in his eye never left you sure who was fooling whom.
After arriving on Parliament Hill in the early 1970s, Mike Duffy lived mostly in the National Capital Region. In 2003, he and wife Heather bought a home next to the Kanata Golf and Country Club for $293,000. He continued to bask in his popularity and influence, acquiring plenty of inside stories about Ottawa’s major players and sharing them, a celebrity raconteur, with colleagues in such power venues as Mama Teresa’s and Hy’s restaurants.
Duffy developed a taste, as befits a celebrity, for expensive cars and good clothes. In a tax court case, according to Jonathan Gatehouse of Maclean’s “Duffy had made some inventive attempts to lower his tax burden,” including a claim his wardrobe of costly clothes actually consisted of “uniforms” belonging to the CTV network. It was not an implausible contention, since he needed them when appearing on-camera, but as Gatehouse notes, “Revenue Canada disagreed and presented him with a bill for $21,000.”
Duffy attempted to parlay his celebrity standing into even higher acceptability with Canada’s establishment in a number of ways, such as by gaining investiture into the Order of Canada. His orchestrated campaign suffered irreparable damage, however, at the hands of Frank magazine. The publication was repeatedly, and tiresomely, on Duffy’s case — calling him “the Puffster,” running unflattering photos, noting his dwindling audience ratings, and once designating him “Eyesore of the Year.” Then a headline called Mike Duffy “A Fat-Faced Liar” after the broadcaster spread word he was going to the United States to speak in Durham at North Carolina’s renowned Duke University, but, as Frank disclosed, his true destination was instead a weight-loss clinic in the state. His prospects for the prestigious Order of Canada, which he’d evidently tried not once but three times to achieve, were apparently scuppered by this ongoing attack from Frank. Prime Minister Chrétien privately confided to Duffy that this sort of publicity had thwarted his nomination to the Order. Duffy sued Frank and won, reported Jonathan Gatehouse in Maclean’s, “an apology and a $30,000 out-of-court settlement.”
Despite this acrimonious history with Frank, when Duffy later became embroiled in behind-the-scenes power struggles at CTV, he did not hesitate to leak information about his rivals to the magazine. Now he would gratefully use his former nemesis as a new ally in serious battle to protect his reputation and livelihood. Clearly, Mike Duffy’s career-honed survival instinct enabled him to adapt for self-protection and change his stance dramatically if the stage upon which he played his starring role shifted.
The issues that percolated at this time between Duffy and CTV concerned disputes over expenses and contract provisions. When his personal behaviour was caricatured by fellow journalist John Fraser, or criticized by another journalist, Don Martin, or complained about formally by CTV producer Carl Langelier, Duffy was swift to strike back, either personally or through his lawyers. Colleagues learned to give his sensibilities wide berth. Complaints went uninvestigated. Transgressions remained unpunished. Even the Parliamentary Press Gallery, whose constitution prohibits members from using their position on The Hill to gain any benefit “except through journalism,” ignored Duffy’s decades-long campaign for the benefit of a prime ministerial appointment to the Senate. Rather than enforcing their only rule on ethical conduct, the journalists of the Press Gallery treated Duffy’s breach of their constitution as a joke.
In a country where thousands crave a seat in the Senate, Mike Duffy was unrivalled as Canada’s most ardent supplicant for appointment to the upper house. Everyone surmised that if he had any path into the Red Chamber, it would be across the red soils of Prince Edward Island. But the island province with just four Senate seats knows only infrequent vacancies. For Duffy’s progress, an incumbent P.E.I. senator had to hit retirement age seventy-five or die in office. “Every time Mike Duffy shakes my hand,” quipped Prince Edward Island Senator Heath Macquarie, “he takes my pulse!”
Over his many years on Parliament Hill, some half-dozen different prime ministers received Duffy’s barrage of appeals. Most everyone working around Parliament Hill referred to him, either with a chuckle or dismissively, as “the Senator.”
Brian Mulroney, aware of the standing joke, shocked reporters the day he announced that he’d been trying for years to persuade Mike Duffy to accept a seat in the Senate but the broadcaster had turned the prime minister down flat. Following a pause of stunned disbelief, Mulroney chuckled delivering his punch line, “It’s the speakership of the Senate he wants, or nothing at all. These guys from P.E.I. sure know what to hold out for!”
In the 1990s, it was Jean Chrétien’s turn to face the incessant battery of pitches by the wannabe senator. The former PM told the Charlottetown Guardian on October 30, 2013, that at least “a hundred times” he’d been ambushed. “When he was in the lobby of the House of Commons, he would say, ‘Hi prime minister. I’m ready, I’m ready!’”
Mr. Chrétien refused the plea each time it was made. “I had the good judgment not to name him, I guess.” The Liberals did, however, examine the possibility. When asked by the PM, Liberal MP for Charlottetown Shawn Murphy volunteered a comment that squelched the possibility: Duffy “couldn’t be considered an Islander” because he’d not lived in Prince Edward Island since the 1960s. Mike Duffy’s pleas were not taken seriously by anybody except, perhaps, “the Senator” himself.
Duffy was unrelenting, however, and following the Liberal loss of power, he turned his attention to the new Conservative government. In the run-up to in the national general election of October 2008, when Prime Minister Harper’s minority Conservative government was seeking re-election and the Liberals were led by Stéphane Dion, Duffy broadcast an interview the Liberal leader recorded in the Halifax studio of a CTV affiliate.
The interview started badly. The party’s leader displayed hesitancy with some English words and appeared not to quite understand the opening question. A number of re-starts were recorded on camera. Normally such failed beginnings get cut, giving viewers a better impression. That this standard practice would be followed was apparently the understanding between the interviewer, the Liberal leader, and his advisers — in short, CTV would put together and broadcast the best of the interview, leaving any evidence of ineptness on the cutting room floor. But when Duffy saw raw footage of the entire interview, he could not wait to broadcast the halting missteps and re-takes. Whether dismayed or amused, Canadians across the country, in the course of making up their mind about whom to vote for, saw many replays of a seemingly incompetent person who aspired to be prime minister. Mr. Harper, whose campaign was faltering, met reporters that night to add scorn.
The damage Mike Duffy inflicted on Mr. Dion’s campaign was measurable. Stephen Harper won the October 2008 general election and formed another government, still a minority but with an increased number of seats. A panel at the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council concluded that journalist Duffy violated broadcasting codes and ethics by airing the