OTTAWA—Criminal trial, meet campaign trail.
The long-running Mike Duffy saga pulled focus from the federal election Wednesday, Aug. 12, as Nigel Wright—Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff and the beleaguered senator’s $90,000 man—finally told his side of the story.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it dovetailed with what the prime minister has been saying for years: that Harper was never aware of a plan for either the Conservative party or Wright himself to pay back Duffy’s impugned expense claims.
“Mr. Duffy came to me, and I said to him that his expenses, in my judgment, could not be justified,” Harper told a news conference at a campaign event in Vancouver as Wright was testifying in an Ottawa courtroom.
Harper said it was always his understanding that Duffy would repay the expenses himself.
“That’s what we were told was going to happen,” he said. “When I found out that is not what happened, that in fact they'd been repaid by somebody else, we made that information public and I took the appropriate action.”
Harper did not clarify what has long been a murky area in the Duffy affair: whether or not Wright’s departure from the Prime Minister’s Office was voluntary. He also continued to take credit for making the scheme public when in fact it was a CTV News report that first disclosed Wright’s $90,000 payment.
The New Democrats wasted no time taking full advantage of the scandal’s explosive return to prominence Wednesday.
“Nigel Wright may be on the witness stand, but it’s Stephen Harper who is on trial,” NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said during a campaign event in Levis, Que.
