Let’s look at two separate scandals involving expenses, shall we? See if you can spot the difference.
SENATE LIVING COSTS: $90,172.24
Although he’d lived in Ottawa for decades, Conservative senator Mike Duffy listed a PEI property as his primary residence. This enabled him to claim more than $90,000 in living costs over the course of four years. When news of this emerged, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had appointed Duffy as a senator from PEI, demanded that Duffy repay the expenses. Duffy refused. As the scandal grew, the prime minister’s chief of staff Nigel Wright secretly gave Duffy the money so he could pay it back. (That’s right, this scandal involves the Conservatives trying to pay back money.) When knowledge of Wright’s payment became public, Wright resigned and the RCMP launched an investigation. Had Mike Duffy defrauded taxpayers and, in accepting Wright’s offer, accepted a bribe as well? Charges were laid and a full-scale media frenzy began.
FALLOUT: The investigation of and subsequent trial over Duffy’s $90,000 expense claims dragged on for two years and cost taxpayers $478,000. In the end, Mike Duffy was cleared of all charges. The damage had been done, though, and the ongoing trial almost certainly changed the course of the 2015 election.
Moving Costs from Toronto to Ottawa: $126,669.56
Gerald Butts and Justin Trudeau are old school buddies, and when Justin became prime minister, Gerald became Justin’s principle secretary and top adviser, the “BFF in the PMO,” as the Globe and Mail described it. (The opening lines of the Globe profile read like a wedding invitation backstory: “Ever since Gerald Butts met Justin Trudeau in their days at McGill, the two men have shared a love of literature and a taste for adventure.”)
In some circles, Gerald Butts is known as the “shadow prime minister.” Others consider him Justin’s “puppet-master.” Maclean’s describes him as “perhaps the most powerful unelected person in the nation’s capital.” This is the same Gerald Butts who denounced people who were laughing at Justin over his “peoplekind” comment as being in league with “alt-right nazis.” (Gerald is very good at spotting nazis.)
When Butts moved from Toronto to Ottawa, he billed the government (i.e., taxpayers, i.e., you and me) more than $126,000 in relocation costs. That’s right, Gerald Butts charged more in expenses in one weekend than Mike Duffy did in four years. (Okay, so we don’t know how long it actually took him to “relocate.” But it sure as hell wasn’t four years. How one even goes about spending that sort of money to get from Toronto to Ottawa is an achievement in itself. I imagine each item being wrapped individually in silk and carried on velvet cushions by a procession of personal valets.)
FALLOUT: None. Number of police investigations: zero. Number of charges laid: nada. Number of media frenzies: zip. Instead, Butts simply assured us that his claims were perfectly legitimate and then agreed to pay back more than $40,000 of the money he took. Which is to say, we still had to foot $85,000 in moving fees for Justin’s BFF. Gerald Butts did finally quit, but not because he suddenly had an attack of propriety regarding his expenses, heaven forbid, but due to the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Remember the old saying: A friend will pick you up at the airport, a good friend will help you move, but a best friend will resign under strange circumstances in order to provide a public distraction from your ham-handed dealings with a former justice minister. The old sayings are the best sayings.