Hey, Big Spender!

"Anything that was interesting in our local papers, I'd scan it and send it to him, thinking he might be interested in it. Any picture in the paper that might have the cousins playing sports, anything like that, I kept him informed."
"My brother's kid's soccer team, Mike's second cousin winning a chess tournament. That's all I can think of right now."
David McCabe, Mike Duffy cousin, testifying at criminal trial

"I can remember Senator Duffy telling me budgets were tight and, as a result, he would still pay me the amount, but he'd do it in a different way."
"I vetted those speeches because he sometimes had a tendency to come over the top on political niceties, shall we say, and I would look over them to make them fit the crowd he was going to be talking to."
"I told him orally how much I charged to him for the year, because he had said to me he was going to find another way to pay it."
Peter McQuaid, Prince Edward Island Conservative

Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS  The lawyer for suspended senator Mike Duffy promised Tuesday that a judge would hear directly from Duffy about how and why he used the Donohue-owned companies to direct payment for makeup services, nearly $1,400 in photo reprints and advice from a family member

Such a generous fellow, generous to a fault. The fault, needless to say, was that he was inordinately generous but not with his own money, heaven forfend! Suspended Senator Mike Duffy, so well loved by the public, by the Conservative crowd, by those who knew and acknowledged his popular celebrity draw and his capacity for drawing in both the crowds and the money to swell campaign chests for the Conservative party saw no need to pull money out of his own pocket.

He certainly has company in that regard; infamously, a former (Liberal) Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau never bothered carrying filthy lucre around with him, and as a result never had to pay for anything; his aides always ponied up. Oh, and another Prime Minister, (Conservative) Brian Mulroney, thought it would be a pretty good idea for him, broke as he was, to take $300,000 in cash from a shady arms-dealing lobbyist.

And he felt entitled to charge the Government of Canada $150,000 for furniture he left at 24 Sussex when he resumed life as a private citizen. Furniture, as it happens, that the Conservative party had paid for, to please the very particular tastes and expectations that the Mulroneys, forever crying poor, felt they should be entitled to, in reflection of their established tastes in furnishings and decorations.

In the expressively-rich language of Yiddish such people are called schnorrers, the definition of which is a beggar or scrounger. But English interpretations simply are incapable of doing justice to the meaning of the word in reflection of a disgusting parasitic personality.

Ironically enough, it is those with the financial wherewithal who exhibit the most schorridic tendencies, as evidenced more than capably by the aforementioned, inclusive of Mike Duffy, former newsman, former distinguished Senator in the red-carpeted Senate of Canada. Where, it is becoming increasingly evident, he had more than plenty company among those considered honourable in their intentions, so much so that rules of repayment rested on honour and decency.

Both of which Senator Duffy and others, but not quite to the same extent that he did, abused, tarnishing the very notion of Senatorial honour and decency. Poor Mike Duffy, despite a salary that would make most Canadians drool with envy, he had expenses that the salary couldn't begin to cover; expenses personal in nature that the Senate would never deign to use taxpayer money for, but could manage to blink when expense forms were submitted, regardless.

So a personal trainer, a cosmetician, framing of personal photographs, a cousin's snipping of politically irrelevant news items, financial gifts to volunteers and to those who did professional 'favours' to the Old Duff somehow got paid through money funnelled to a made-up corporation which then went about dispersing various sums that Mr. Generous determined should be sent off to his anointed cronies and acquaintances for services rendered.

Ah, but his sanctimoniously skilled lawyer is holding Senate rules to the letter of the law, to exonerate his poor, innocent client who had no illegal intention in mind when he appropriated taxpayer funding to scatter gifts in a bid to ensure that his popular appeal would never wane. Until it did, when an intrepid investigative journalist sniffed a story and ran with it, revealing the unsavoury details of Senate misdemeanours.

Resulting in the oh-so-popular Senator being turfed by the Conservatives, enraging him no end by the utter unfairness of it all. For did he not give his all for them?

Suspended Sen. Mike Duffy walks to the Ottawa court house in Ottawa Tuesday, April 7, 2015. The 68-year-old journalist-turned-senator goes on trial for 31 fraud and bribery charges. Tony Caldwell/Ottawa Sun/QMI Agency