The Honourable Mike Duffy

"The questions become unfair and abusive at a certain point. How many times must she [Nicole Proulx, employee, Senate of Canada] maintain (the same position) before Mr. Bayne must move on to other areas?"
Crown prosecutor Mark Holmes -- Mike Duffy trial

"I didn't expect payment [from Mike Duffy]. If you're a friend talking to somebody on the phone and you're giving them some advice on whatever, usually friends don't ask for money for the advice. That's what I got paid to do in government."
William Kittelberg[aka]Bill Rodgers, reporter, government employee

Mike Duffy has sat through 22 days of his trial, which broke Friday for three weeks at what was supposed to be about the halfway point for the trial. It is now expected to last much longer than that. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Suspended Senator Duffy's lawyer, Donald Bayne, is evidently having the time of his life. Nitpicking, manipulating, accusing, leading, belittling, badgering Crown witnesses, particularly those who state their support of and belief in the Senate of Canada, its rules of conduct, and the honour of its sitting members, not all of whom have earned that distinction of 'honourable' in their conduct of entitlements' claims.

And Mike Duffy is most certainly the leading exponent of draining entitlements for all they're worth, claiming entitlements that fall on the decidedly dark side of ethics and morality. So dark they edge perilously close to fraud. And fraud indeed is one of the charges brought against him; 31 in total, including bribery and breach of trust.

If Senators gave as their reason for travel, billed to the Senate as "Senate business" the finance department in the Senate generally took their word as dependable, honest, reliable. They might have had their doubts on occasion, but after all these were honourable Senators the Senate employees were dealing with; call them out? Was that an option?

"The system you've set up deliberately creates a system where you don't ask questions", lawyer Bayne shouted in accusation at the then-Senate's top administrator Nicole Proulx, as he defended the indefensible. This was a man after all, who knew the ins and outs of politics; he studied it, practised it at a remove, reported on it, revelled in it. And he was informed unequivocally when he joined the Senate of its rules of internal economy.

Not merely verbally, but by being handed multiple documents setting out the expected rules of conduct, and what was permissible to claim as expenses and what was not. And, should something not be completely clear, he and his colleagues were further advised, the Senate staff was at their service; ask and they would receive the advice they sought. If they sought it. Mike Duffy did not; he preferred to manipulate, to insist, to assert.

Ah, but his lawyer keeps pushing the 'fact' that Mike Duffy was on a learning curve; he really didn't know. The very day he was verbally invited to join the Senate, before the appointment became official, he began expensing his daily living to the Senate, from a house he had owned and lived in, in Ottawa for years. After all, he was appointed a PEI senator.

Obviously perusing the Senate Administrative Rules, the Travel Policy Guidelines, the Senators' Resource Guide, the Companion Guide to Senators' Attendance Policy, gave him no clue whatever what he could legitimately charge and what he could not. One of the quite interesting charges was for the Senate to pay for his and his wife's flight from Charlottetown to Ottawa. They just happened to be in PEI at a time when Mike Duffy was invited to speak in 2012 at the Ottawa Building Owners and Managers Association.

The Senate was billed $3,200 for that flight. And the Building Owners association paid Duffy through the speaking agency he used, $10,075, along with tax. Mike Duffy and his wife took advantage of a several-day stayover in Ottawa, where they have lived for decades -- while owning a basic summer cottage in Prince Edward Island which he took to claiming as his principle residence, allowing him to bill $22,000 annually for his residence in Ottawa -- for scheduled medical appointments before flying back to PEI.

Some people do have a sense of honour; Mike Duffy wasn't one of them. Invited as a Senator to a speaking engagement, he is already paid as a Senator, but he, like the now-leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Justin Trudeau, took handsomely paid speaking engagements; Trudeau as a Member of Parliament who charged heftily to speak to health, charity and educational groups; Duffy as a Senator to speak to whomever would pay him.

And Duffy wanted to be liked, and to be considered generous, so he arranged to have those with whom he was on a friendly footing, and who did favours for him, or provided a level of service for him, to be paid. Not through his more than generous senatorial salary, but through the subterfuge of hiring a company that does construction, ostensibly to do 'speechwriting' for him; in fact acting as a front where he could pass money gleaned from the Senate on to these people to pay them for services that the Senate would never pay for, according to their rule books.

But his lawyer contends that his client is not at fault, is completely innocent of any intention to cheat, to take what he is not entitled to, to live high on the hog as it were at the taxpayer's teat, because he is a good and decent man and simply did not understand the rules. Some lawyer, that; is there any honour in the practise of law?