Oh, What a Tangled Web!

"We are not asking the senators to absolve him of anything -- they would refuse that quite properly. We are asking them to treat the repayment as the final chapter of the expenses issue relating to his designation of the P.E.I. cottage as his primary residence to this point in time.
"That is something to which Sens. LeBreton, Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen already agreed once."
Former chief of staff in the PMO, Nigel Wright

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa November 20, 2013. REUTERS/Chris Wattie

These are the words of a man tasked to take the initiative to solve a recurring problem with a rogue PM-appointed Senator whose actions and stubbornly-conceived 'entitlements' have brought disgrace to the Senate of Canada, and by extension to the office of the PMO and the judgement of the Prime Minister of Canada. Let he/she whose judgement is above criticism stand here and make themselves known....

Nigel Wright is said to be an intelligent, honourable man of rigidly scrupulous principles. And those would be the very same attributes that those who appreciate the current Prime Minister of Canada would ascribe similarly to him. It is beyond doubt to many who voted for Stephen Harper and would vote for him again, that he is endowed with a resolute veracity beyond question.

His fidelity to reason and his personal code of ethics are also evident in his persona. When people are vexed by circumstances and particularly by those circumstances that bring them in close counsel with a mind that is stubbornly opposed to admitting having done illicit things, choosing to prevaricate, to object, to insist on innocence and entitlements, that kind of persistence can break down the most patient of interlocutors.

People can resort to subterfuge to attempt to save a situation. Frustration can ensure that the most scrupulous minds are capable of overlooking details. The urge to do something practical that will have the effect of solving the dilemma can be powerfully predictive of something, some loose ends, coming back to haunt the individual whose busy slate has been compounded by a nuisance but troubling incident.

Nigel Wright's attempts to lead Mike Duffy to the realization that he had indeed betrayed himself by his capricious greed, failing to uphold the honour that was imagined to exist in the minds of all the elite personalities elevated to the Senate to become part of government, failed spectacularly. Mike Duffy insisted repeatedly no wrong was done by him. Furthermore, though he had claimed tens of thousands in expense claims he was not entitled to, he hadn't the means to restore it to the Senate.

Nigel Wright, a wealthy man in his own right, succumbed to the thought that he had expendable funds that could conceivably solve that problem. Mike Duffy demanded that something be done to restore him to confidence that his seat in the Senate would be secure for him; engaging in a strange bidding war that would advantage him without any measure of penalty for his immoral acts and his insistence he was within his rights.

The trouble is that Mike Duffy is a blusterer as well as a fabricator of facts. Someone who evades reality and who confounds others attempting to find a solution to a problem growing larger by the day that he had initiated and continued to compound by his insistence of entitlements. His very presence was a reproach and a giant headache to the government. In attempting to deal with the issue, decisions were made to be later regretted.

But this entire affair has appeared as a game of Gotcha! to the news media. The Fifth Estate felt they had been shafted by this prime minister who had no time for their expectations that he regularly submit to news scrums, and be agreeable to questioning at the whim of journalists and reporters.

They felt slighted and overlooked and resentful, insisted that the avoidance by the prime minister represented a failing and a short-coming for people reading the news wanting to know the detailed responses to reporters' questions lobbed at the prime minister.

Their vengeance, smothered in schadenfreude, has been served cold and sanctimoniously. And that too cannot be a very good thing for democracy.