Chapter 3, Episode 102 Senator Mike Duffy

Chris, it's a delight to be on with you. It's a delight to be part of someone who is the next generation, the next phase of journalism in Canada. It's my pleasure.

Let's talk about that for a second. Journalism in Canada. You have had an extensive career in journalism starting back in Prince Edward Island with the Charlottetown Guardian to the halls of power in Ottawa. Looking back on your career, you would not see that in today's society. Journalism does not happen as you did when you were a kid and becoming the person who you are today. How has your world changed since you have been around?

Well, I started out writing for the Charlottesville newspaper on weekends, high school news and record reviews, as a freelancer and being unpaid. I was into music. I was really dazzled by the magic of radio. This is before, we're talking the 60s, the early 60s, and TV was just had just been around in Canada for fewer than 10 years. It was a bit different. As a kid in grade school, I was invited to be part of a kind of Reach for the Top show that was on local radio every week. A bunch of school kids went to the radio studio and there were two teams from two schools and we did the usual Reach for the Top thing. We were in a studio that had been used by Don Messer and his Islanders, which was a musical band that broadcast from Charlottetown all across the CBC network. As a kid growing up in those days before TV, you would sit in the evenings or after school and look at the radio as if it was the TV because you had no TV. And then this magical stuff would come across the radio, including Don Messer, who was actually a few blocks away downtown with his orchestra playing, and here it was being heard all over the country, all over Canada. Finally, as a kid in grade five or six, we're in this studio, there are boom mics hanging, and the walls weren't straight because they had deliberately put curves in to reduce echo. You would see if you went back and looked at an old-fashioned studio in the old movies. Here it was, and I said, man, this is magic, it comes from this room, and here I am with my gang from school, and we're in this same room and we're broadcasting to all of Prince Edward Island. It was quite a remarkable feeling. It was the magic of radio. Then as I got older, I got interested in media. We had a weekly in 1962, a weekly TV show called Club 62, which again was kind of crazy. The woman who was the producer got the kids together from local high schools and we had our, you know, this is your show so you'll plan it out. We had to pick a name and we couldn't think of a name, so somebody said, well what about it's 1962, let's call it Club 62. We did that and the station made a little animated opening on a film camera with music playing and pictures of us bouncing around on the screen. But then we got to January of 63 and we were still Club 62. Then we had a second season and we're 63, 64. So you know, advanced planning. What about the name? That again got me interested and provided me with some focus. I spent more time getting ready for this weekly TV show and writing my weekly column for the newspaper about high school news. I did that and didn't study. So, that's how I got it in my blood.

Then one day I'm in French class and my teacher gets a message and he calls me out. I think what's going on. We go out into the hall and he says, I've just had a message from the radio station in Halifax. He was a stringer for CHNS radio in Halifax and they called him at the high school and said we want you to go down and cover a story. He says I can't go down and cover this breaking news story because I'm a teacher. I've got classes, I can't just walk out and leave them. They said well we have to cover this, there's a ship, an oil tanker burning in Charlottetown harbor and they've evacuated downtown Charlottetown. So here I am, Mr. Club 62, Mr. Weekend newspaper columnist. He called me, Duffy, get out here, he says, there's a ship burning in the harbor, go down and here's the phone number for the radio station in Halifax. So I go down and there's one or two reporters and the police chief and the fire chief all standing in a knot. I run up and say what's going on and start taking notes. They were briefing the local media. I went into an empty, they had emptied the waterfront and there was a potato warehouse right over there. I went in and there was a phone on the desk. I dialed zero and said I want to make a collect call. The guy says look out the door, can you see the ship? Yeah, it's just like a hundred yards away. What do you see? So I start describing to him what I see and I don't even think about it but he's recording me on the phone, giving a description of this oil tanker. It was a small little coastal oil tanker, Irving the Sea Conch. I thought, wow, this is better than school. We're down here where it's happening and unlike those hundreds of people who are back up two blocks away behind the police lines, you're a journalist so you've got a front row seat.

So then they towed the ship out into the harbor and beached it on a sandbar so that it could burn away from the populated area, just burn itself out. CHNS said to me, where's the captain? I said well they all got off the ship and went down to the Queen Hotel and they're having lunch I think. Go down to the Queen Hotel. So I go down, is there a phone in the lobby? I said yeah. So I go down to this local hotel that's no longer there. He said call me from the lobby. So I go in, get on the pay phone, call him back. He says now leave the phone hanging, go into the dining room and tell the captain there's a long distance call for him in the lobby. I go in and there's the captain and I tell him, I don't tell him who it is, I just say, captain there's a long distance call. He comes out, picks up the phone, they've got the tape rolling and they interview him. Captain what happened to your ship? Blah blah blah. So CHNS had an interview he wasn't giving interviews to the local media. The guy at CHNS said to me, people will interrupt anything to answer a long distance phone call. So I say to myself, my god, they beat the locals who the captain just walked by, no no I'm not talking, and went to lunch. I thought wow, this is better than almost anything else I can think of. That was when journalism was journalism.

To me the game was getting the story. How do you, you know, and I was learning from the guy who was quarterbacking me in Halifax how you do it, how you get information, stuff that nobody else has and you get to put it on the air. That's what intrigued me. This was fun, this was interesting, this was a challenge. I fear that in a lot of what I see today, people have a plan or an ideology or something and they want to use the media to straighten out the world. That to me is not the way I grew up with journalism. You assume that if you give the public all of the facts in a democracy, the public will make the right choices. I didn't come at it with an ideology or a particular point of view. I came at it saying what are the facts and let the public decide. They're intelligent. The people they elected put themselves before the electorate and the electorate said yay or nay. So who am I? Who elected me? Nobody. I was hired by the editor to do a job not to change the world. That doesn't mean when you see something that's wrong you shouldn't report it, but it's putting the cart before the horse.

From there I went full time at the Guardian and learned the basics of who, what, where, when and why. Then I went and starved. Newspapering was fine but I wasn't a particularly talented writer. So I thought I want to get into broadcasting. This is the thing that I find so exciting, the immediacy of it. In those days we didn't have mini-cams and the kind of live capability on TV you have today. So I went into radio. I went to Halifax. I spent the summer of 64 managing a rock and roll band, the Beavers. Yes indeed. Then I came back in the fall of 64 to Halifax and I worked washing dishes in a restaurant and reading the news on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday night on CJCH radio. I got $15 a shift and the rent at the Y was $30 a week. So I had no money for food. Needless to say I wasn't overweight. But the Oland's had a hockey team staying at the Y in Halifax in training camp and there was always somebody from the team who didn't make the meal. So I'd go in with the boys and today you're Joe Smith and tomorrow you're Harry Brown. I just signed they had paid for so many meals. So that's how I ate. Then I would go up the street and spend every waking hour at the radio station watching how they did it in Halifax, which was seen then as the big time. I was terrible. I read the news on the weekends and the rest of the time I hung around watching learning, see how they did things.

Anyway, at the end of three months they pulled me aside and said listen, you're not cutting it on Saturday and Sunday night. You've got to go to a small town and practice, practice, practice. So I didn't have a job. They drove me out to the end of the Bicentennial Highway leading to Halifax and a friend, not the management, a friend handed me a five dollar bill and said good luck. I was hitchhiking in my little suit and suitcase with my scrapbook from the newspaper, hitchhiking back home to PEI for Christmas of 64. The rides weren't very plentiful and so I ended up in Truro on my way to the car ferry. The deal was you need three bucks to get on the ferry. So I had two dollars, a buck for a hamburger and a coke. Anyway, I went to the police station in Truro and said I have nowhere to stay and I'm in my little outfit. Can I spend the night in the jail? The officer said no no no, we have a rec room upstairs. You can sleep on the sofa and there's a washroom up there. So I went up to the policeman's lounge and dumped my stuff and took my clippings over to the radio station. It was the end of the day, most people had left. But the DJ who was there said hey, we've been looking for a guy to work at our station in Amherst which is a hundred miles down the road. We'll send your resume down there. So I did. The next day I hitchhiked home to PEI. My parents picked me up at the ferry. I was back and my father said you've got to get a job, you can't do this broadcasting thing, it's not working for you. I've investigated and in January the local vocational school has a course for electricians. So I've got you enrolled in this electrician's course. I thought well that's very interesting but I still have my dream right.

Sure enough a few days later the manager of the radio station in Amherst calls me and I pitch myself to him. He says well come on over. So my parents scraped up the money, we had no money, scraped up the cash and I got a bus ticket to Amherst. From $15 a shift in Halifax I was hired at $70 a week at CKEDH in Amherst. That was it. I worked 20 hours a day. Not that they asked me to, I was just, give me the opportunity. Then I learned lesson number one for journalism. Even though I'd seen some other stuff before, I learned a couple of things through all that. One, I wasn't blessed with a deep voice. I wasn't particularly handsome, so nobody was talking about me for TV. The first big thing was you had to have a set of pipes and I didn't have that. So how do you compensate? What do you offer if you don't offer the classic thing? One of them was hustle. Two was the ability to get stories. So I tried to make up for my lack of a deep voice by making sure I hustled, understood what the bosses wanted, and learned as much as I could watching others who were good at it and who worked at it.

Who were some of those people that you watched? Because I always find it fascinating. Before this interview I listed the people who I watched and you were one of them. Who were the people you watched? Well in Halifax during my Saturday night, Sunday night time there, there was a local radio reporter named Max Keeping who later went on to fame in Ottawa as the anchor and news director at CJOH, the CTV station. But Max in the 60s had just come out of Newfoundland. He was wearing his Beetle boots and his curly hair. He was a character but he was very smart. He taught me how to go early to events to cover three events at the same time. You go early to the first one and you explain your situation to the main actor and say listen I can't stay because I've got all these other things, so can you give me a quick burst on what you're doing now? Then you go to another event that is at the regular schedule time. You leave it early and you have two microphones. You have a tape recorder and you have two microphones. One you're using to record the news conference at the appointed time and then you pop your microphone out and grab your tape recorder and zip off to the next one. You use your tape recorder because you only have one recorder at the third event. Then you go back later and pick up the mic from the second event. So Max was a master of this kind of stuff. I just watched him like a sponge. He was my main instructor before Amherst.

Then in Amherst I practiced and practiced. In 65 at Christmas 65 I got a call from CKOY in Ottawa. They're a 50,000 watt station. Hal Anthony was the news director and he calls me up and says I hear that you're a hustler and that's what I want. Somebody to do the night shift in Ottawa. So he asked me to read him a piece of wire copy over the phone and says you sound fine, great. For young people the advice, so I'm going to quit Amherst after a year and I'm going to go to Ottawa. I called my parents and said I've had this offer for a hundred bucks a week in Ottawa. My father says to me don't ever leave a place that you can't go back. So when you leave, thank the people in Amherst, tell them you love them, tell them you appreciate all they've done for you. Don't mouth off about, you know, you guys are small time, I'm going to the big time. Just be polite and be courteous. I said okay, good idea. So I get in my little Volkswagen and drive to Ottawa, non-stop. I get there and of course nobody knows who I am. Anyway, I'm there for two weeks and they come to me and say you're not cutting it. You don't have the pipes. Hal Anthony says my advice to you young man is to go sell ties at Eaton's. You'll never make it in this business. So I was heartbroken. But he said we have phoned Amherst and told them you weren't ready and they said he's a good kid, send him back, we haven't filled his job, we're happy to have him back. Thank you dad for that bit of advice to keep your mouth shut and be polite. So I went back.

Six months later I get called to Halifax to the other station in Halifax, CHNS. Just one final thing about being humble. When I was starving at CJCH the first time around, doing Saturday and Sunday night, finally after a couple of weeks my first paycheck arrives. I'm desperate for money. The news director was a guy named Robert McCleave. He had been a Conservative MP and was later a Conservative MP and Deputy Speaker. But this was out of office and the manager of the station gave him a job to get him through the period. The owner of the station, the goddamn paycheck comes and it's made out to Mike Gillis, not Mike Duffy. So here I am. McCleave was the original absentminded professor. So here I've got this check, I have no credibility, no nothing. I have to go down to the CBC and find Mike Gillis and get him to countersign the check so I can go to the bank and cash it. I go down and find Mike Gillis at the CBC and say you won't believe this but here's this paycheck. So it teaches you to be humble. Then I get to Halifax in 65. I'm doing everything. I'm rolling discs on FM in the morning and I'm doing city hall and the legislature and everything that moves, city council at night. I'm going day and night. That's 65 and I'm learning every day. Eventually they take me off the FM and just have me full time on the news.

In 67 Robert Stanfield was the Premier of Nova Scotia and in 1967 he decides he's going to run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. Their convention was in Toronto. I said to the station, Stanfield's your hometown boy, surely you're going to Toronto? Oh nobody. We're a network affiliate, we'll just take the feed from the network. We don't have to spend money on something as luxurious as this. We had a deal at the station where if you're a stringer somewhere else and you call in and do what we call a voice report, we paid you five bucks. I said look, if we're paying five bucks for these people in the outports to call in stories, what if I go on my own to Toronto and will you pay me five dollars? They said well yeah, I guess so, okay, if you're really that determined. So I go down to Household Finance because I had no money and I borrowed $500. That got me to Toronto airfare and a week at the Westbury Hotel. I've got my tape recorders and stuff. So I went there and of course Stanfield wins. We were part of Standard Broadcasting which was CFRB with all these people with deep voices. They had a briefing every day and they would say blah blah blah. The last person they called on was the kid from Halifax. They asked what is Stanfield doing? I said well Stanfield's people say we're doing really well and we've got this number of delegates. They said yeah, he won't win. Of course Stanfield won. All of a sudden who's coming to the kid from Halifax? The big stars at CFRB where they had Gordon Sinclair and Betty Kennedy and all these people. They're saying can you get Stanfield to come on our radio show? I'm the guy who had no hope. Stanfield was a candidate with no hope but now all of a sudden I'm a hero. I did get the interview. What it did to me was it energized me to understand, to confirm that people get excited about things like sports. But at the end of the day sports don't matter. It may matter to you emotionally but it doesn't change the country. It gives us something to cheer for or to hate. But politics is fun. It's the A team and the B team, the red team, the blue team, the green team, the orange team. It's like the NHL playoffs. At the end of the day, whoever wins shapes the course of history. Could be Prime Minister Stanfield, never was, but all of that, you have fun and it's a contest and it matters. That convinced me that covering politics was critically important.

One other thing from that time. In 65 there was a general election. I was the boy reporter in Amherst which is Cumberland County, Nova Scotia. The MP was a guy named Bob Coates who later became Brian Mulroney's Minister of National Defense. As the local reporter and the local MP, you got to know the MP pretty well, at least he knew who you were. In 65, Diefenbaker, the legendary John Diefenbaker, is campaigning in the Maritimes on a train. He's tied onto the back of the Ocean Limited going from Montreal to Halifax. He's getting off in various stops doing little mini rallies in all these small towns. He's coming to Amherst. Bob Coates arranges for me to get on the train. He says come to the big event in Truro on the train. I'll get you an interview with the chief, Mr. Diefenbaker. You can drive back with me and some other people from Amherst from Truro. Somebody will have a car and we'll all come back. Great. So I get on the train and Tom Van Dusen Sr. meets me. For those who watch the media, the Van Dusens are a legendary Ottawa family. CPAC is Tom Van Dusen's son Peter Van Dusen, there's Tom Van Dusen's son, and Julie Van Dusen who just retired from CBC was Tom Van Dusen's daughter. He was a Tory but also worked later for the Liberals. He was a thoroughly decent lovely man. Anyway Tom Van Dusen meets me at the door. Oh yeah come on in, this is the press car. Who's there? Max Keeping, he since left Halifax, went to Ottawa and was back on the 65 election campaign for an Ottawa radio station. So I come in there with my little tape recorder. What are you doing? I said well I've got an interview with Mr. Diefenbaker. No no no, he hasn't talked to the press for three days. He's not going to talk to you. I said well Bob Coates says he's arranged it. Oh Coates is a deep biggy loyalist, he's a big pal of Dief's, maybe he has. What are you going to ask? Here I am boy reporter, 1965, I was not old enough to vote. So what are you going to ask Mr. Diefenbaker? Oh I don't know. What are you going to do for Cumberland County? No no no, that's not good enough. So the whole gang got around a manual portable typewriter, cranked in some copy paper and wrote on behalf of the press gallery who were traveling with them all the questions that they wanted answers. So I go in with my typewritten sheet of questions, put the microphone in. It was quite a scene because he's in the dining private dining car with his team. All these people sitting around this big mahogany table. Dief was there with an open neck shirt and a sweater. There was a guy sitting opposite him in a red velvet smoking jacket, steel gray hair, looked like something out of Hollywood. When I came on I said who's the guy in the red velvet smoking jacket? They said that's Canada's most decorated Canadian General Richard Romer. He was put on the train. Richard Romer's daughter Anne Romer was on City TV in Toronto. Richard Romer was a lawyer and a key advisor to Ontario Premier John Robarts. Richard Romer was put on the train at the request of John Robarts to crank stuff out for Mr. Diefenbaker to use in his speeches that would have special appeal to Ontario where the most people and the most votes are. Part of the trick of Richard Romer was he was complaining that Dief never uses my stuff. He said I've got all kinds of people writing stuff for me. He says I'll tell you what, you get some pink paper or some yellow paper and I'll know it's from you and that way I'll be sure to use it. So Romer gets off the train in Quebec City, goes to a stationary store, buys a stack of pink paper or yellow paper, gets on the train. What happened? That meant that under no circumstances, not even by accident, would Mr. Diefenbaker read a line written by Richard Romer. Now he knows this came from that guy. No way Jose. So anyway, I leave the press car, leave the dining car. I've asked him all these questions and of course he's given me the Diefenbaker treatment. Ah Duffy, where are you from? I said Charlottetown. Oh, I used to know a guy named Gavin Duffy. Does that ring a bell? I said that was my grandfather. Terrible red, he's a terrible Grit. I knew him from the Bar Association. He was a member of the Canadian Bar and president for PEI or whatever. Of course I'm dazzled. I'm 20 years old and I'm thinking my god he knew my grandfather. Then I realized afterwards, nobody ever told me, but it dawns on me that Bob Coates probably briefed him. This is the kid, here's where he's from, his grandfather was the Liberal Speaker of the House in PEI and was a judge. Dief comes in and gives me the old treatment. So I come out of the interview, read all the questions the others, smarter wiser guys, had written for me. As we're leaving the car I see a guy in a white trench coat standing in the vestibule between the cars. I said to Tom Van Dusen is that a Mountie or a bodyguard? He said no, that's Joe Blow from the New York Times. I said to the New York Times? I get an interview in the New York Times says there are no votes for us in the New York Times. That's the whole thing right. So if you're in local media as a young reporter somewhere, you matter because what you write matters to the political leader.

Yes, I agree with you. Part of that is not making a mistake because if you open up to the local media, they're going to ask about something that you perhaps don't know about, haven't been briefed on, your staff made a mistake. Therefore the story of the day will be he doesn't know the most important issue facing Belleville or Cardston, Alberta or wherever you are. So I think some of that has become defensive. I would like to think that we're near the bottom of the pile and that we're going to start to come up in terms of local mattering. I think the public is fed up with the gotcha stuff. Yes, there's great glee in the media, oh we got him, he stumbled or this or that, but the fact of the matter is the public wants to be treated with respect and I think they get tired of talking points.

Well, I thought there was a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of, I would say I was disappointed I guess is an understatement. I told my whole story. I was told by my lawyer you cannot speak publicly because you have an audience of one and the one is the judge. So don't tell your story to the public. But I did tell my story to Dan Leger who totally ignored it and then wrote a book about how much time I spent at the Press Club bar where he also was. I told Mansbridge and his pal Bruce Anderson for hours, like three hours, I went through every single thing before the trial. I said look, I've got a ton of emails. I did not do anything wrong. I did not break the rules. I did not whatever. I've got a ton of emails to prove it. I was extorted by Harper and his gang to do this. It was crazy. It showed in a way how weak Harper was. He wouldn't stand up and say Duffy didn't break the rules, bugger off. He had a simple answer but Harper's one of these guys who thinks he's so smart that he's thinking four or five steps ahead. He thought himself right out of office and the Conservatives have been out ever since. What was disappointing was that in the face of the mob, people who knew me very, very well like Peter Mansbridge ignored all of that and didn't speak up. Part of that is self-preservation because he didn't want the mob inside the CBC to turn on him. Look what they did to Wendy Mesley, they drove her out. Peter knew that. Peter is the ultimate political player. He decided my friend Duffy for 30 years, 20 years, whatever we've been friends. I covered for him in so many ways, not just covering news stories but you know whatever. Anybody had an evening out, oh I was out with Duff, we were drinking. I'd go to the Christmas party and all the wives are looking at me like I'm an animal because I was used by so many husbands as an excuse to say oh I was out with Duff. So that was the disappointing part. Peter has a lot to answer for in terms of where the CBC is now because he facilitated that. He could have said no, not just in relation to me but in relation to everything else that has...

Happened. And he was the most powerful person there, even though he was technically an announcer. But no, no, no.

Well, you got to remember that there were other people who didn't want me at CTV, primarily Craig Oliver. And I won't bother going into that, it's not worth. So Lloyd depended every day on Craig, right. Jack Webster and Bruce Phillips both said to me... it was Bruce Phillips, not Jack Webster, who said, 'When you're going to do a live broadcast, the host... I don't want to get in the slanging match.' Lloyd was having Craig whisper in his ear about what a terrible person I was, and that was from day one. And don't forget, we've been arch competitors. And then I go over to CTV and he didn't bury the hatchet. It's the same way that Peter treated Pam. Pam had been at CTV, arch competitor. CBC brought Pam over for this prime time news thing, and she lasted a year or something and then was driven out. So no, there are rivalries and there are people with agendas and people who constantly work behind the scenes to bring the others down.

I never had the luxury of that kind of scheming because the only way I could survive, because I wasn't handsome and didn't have any voice and all that stuff, was to work, to know stuff before anybody else. And so I was busy hustling. I rarely went to the office. There are no stories in the newsroom; the stories are all on Parliament Hill. So, you know, whether it's coffee in the fifth floor cafeteria or whatever, and you just bump into people. People are retiring. I got stories about Trudeau and Margaret from Jean Marchand, who was leaving the Senate and talked about the first time he met Margaret with Pierre and how passionate Pierre was and madly in love with her and wouldn't consider, you know, if anybody said anything negative, he got quite angry. So no, no. I didn't spend a lot of time in office politics. I thought I've got a job to do over here, and I was dumb enough to think that the bosses see the output, the bosses see what's going on, and they'll recognize the rest of it for just carping and backstabbing.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Never know. No.

Well, you know, all of this stuff hurts, right? And you know, and my wife is... I mean, I shouldn't say it didn't hurt me, but I was able somehow in my head to divorce myself from that. And part of it was to focus on the judge. And, you know, not to be smarmy, not to be catty, not to be haughty, just be humble, go in and tell your story, just tell the truth. And then of course, so the rest of it doesn't matter. And where are they now? And you know, karma's a... you know, people who... you know, the other thing is, part of what happened to me, I think, was the result of trying to stand up and keep politics out of the newsroom.

Apologize. CTV had a farm system. You start out, you come out of J-school, you go to work in the newsroom in Toronto. Then if you show some promise, they put you on Canada AM. In other words, you work all night writing stories and intros and stuff for Ken to AM. And if you do that for a year or so and show up on time and are reliable and so on, it's a kind of a testing period. Then they look at you as a field producer and they put you out with a reporter to help the reporter do their job. And some come to Ottawa as chase producers for the five o'clock show, Evan Solomon show, and or Question Period, which they now tape on Friday, which... yeah, I'm a big believer in live news, you know, or semi-live, i.e. same day. Anyway, but it's through that system that you get people who work on your show. So my routine was I'd wake up in the middle of the night, seven o'clock at 6:30, 7 a.m., I check all the papers, what's going on since I went to bed, and then I would write a quick memo to my senior producer and say here's what I see today, boom boom boom, and we leave this in this blank and say a prayer to the god of breaking news that there'll be something exciting happen that we can make the lead. And then at 10 o'clock we would have a conference call. And so on this conference call we discuss what we were chasing and doing. And what I discovered was that one young woman... well, Jack Clayton's doing this and Jack Clayton's doing that, and every day it was Jack, Jack, Jack. I said hold on, I said we need a hundred thousand viewers a day for this show to... and this has been my philosophy, it wasn't just in response to her but it was the whole reason, raison d'être of the show, which is you've got to have a number that's sustainable that'll cover your costs. And we figured that was a hundred thousand. So if you look at Canadian popular vote, 40% vote Liberal, 40% or 35% vote Tory, and the remainder vote around 20% for the NDP, maybe 22, whatever, and then the fringes. So it seems to me that if you're going to get an audience of 100,000, what you want is as many people as possible from all different points of view. We're a small country. You know, in the States, MSNBC can be on the left and Fox can be on the right and they can each get manageable numbers, and CNN can somehow try and skate in the middle and get decent numbers as well. But in Canada, the population isn't that big for political shows, so you've got to make sure that the Liberals are watching, the Tories are watching, the Dippers are watching. And the only way you can do that is to provide a fair amount of time for everybody, but not to be dominated by the NDP, which is a minor party, my minority party in Canadian political life. And so I'd explain this and then I was the bad guy.

And after two years because oh well I said listen, the NDP will get their time, but unless they're a critical vote on a major issue, that's not where people are. The issue today is whatever, and they'll get a say, but they won't be the show. Anyway, two years later young woman says to me, I'm leaving. I said, oh sorry to hear that, where are you going? I'm going to work for Jack. And I said great, enjoy yourself, don't forget your old pals. Call Toronto and say she's leaving, she's going to work for Jack. Don't send me any more of these hyper partisan people. Send me somebody who understands what we're trying to achieve here, which is to maximize the numbers and be fair to everybody. And the president of CTV says to me, we're an open port, we want to have all comers, we don't want this stuff. Yes yes I said. So no more of this stuff. Yeah yeah I got you, don't worry, we'll all look after her. Next one comes down, her name is Kathleen Monk. She stays two years, same thing, Jack Jack Jack Jack Jack. She goes to work for Jack. And now where do you find Kathleen Monk? She's on the CBC all the time as an NDP spokesperson. She's a lobbyist now in Ottawa. But this is what I'm dealing with.

So every day you had an arm wrestling match at 10 o'clock in the morning with these people who come into broadcasting, come into the news business because they're on a mission. It's not to inform the public, it's to get as much attention as they can for their team. If you want to be a partisan, run for a partisan party. If you want to be a partisan, go out and get elected or go to work for them, wear the badge proudly. It's part of democracy. So but don't try and infiltrate a new show. And so when the fat guy goes down for something he didn't do, all these people who feel I've been the roadblock on the way to socialist nirvana, all these people say yeah, let's give him a good kick while he's down.

Senator for about 10 minutes. And the problem is, is that I was so tired of the fight every day about the NDP and about not putting on when Stephane Dion blew his brains out. All of my buddies who worked on my show, phone don't show that, oh that's so unfair, oh we can't show that. We showed Stanfield dropping a football in 1974 which became the reason why he lost, you know, the symbol of his loss. Absolutely, why would we not put this on? Why would we protect someone who wants to be prime minister of Canada? But they were wearing their partisanship on their sleeves. So when the call came, my first reaction was I don't want to sit, I want to sit as an independent. And the prime minister said I need you, I need to know that I can count on you, I can't have the whip running around chasing you, are you which way you're going to vote. And so I thought about it and thought about it and then reluctantly agreed.

Against the advice of many friends of mine who thought, you know, but I was fed up. That's the bottom line. I was fed up with the constant fights and the backstabbing and all that. The business was changing and I wasn't prepared. Unlike Mansbridge who accommodated it, I wasn't prepared to accommodate it.

Well, it was pretty exciting. I could see from having been so many years in the press gallery, 40 some years whatever, that the Atlantic provinces were approaching their relationship with the rest of the country in a way that I didn't think benefited the Atlantic region. They were pretty combative and they were pretty stuck in their ways. And I knew that in the arc of history eventually the cost of dealing with the baby boom generation, of which I am on the leading edge and I'm 75, would eventually come back to affect. Can we really in the Atlantic region afford four provincial governments with four deputy ministers of education and four deputy ministers of everything and all the associated paraphernalia? And if we're determined to maintain that, jobs for the boys, then what about purchasing? And so I got together with some other maritimers, in other words, let's show the rest of Canada that we are looking for ways to be efficient ourselves and that we're not constantly... One of the things I found was that they don't say it to your face, but behind the scenes, and I'd hear it in my ear or on live broadcast, the central Canadian elite treated Atlantic provinces like poor sisters or welfare cases. Right now they get their hands out again, oh yeah, look at that whining complaining blah blah blah. We in Ontario do everything and we are the engine of growth and these people just come along with their hands out and never do anything. Well, Harper talked about the mentality of defeat or something like that. And I thought we've got to show that we're dynamic and bright and we understand the real world. So a bunch of us advocated for this new approach, and I was able to help a number of PEI organizations in the way they framed their requests to the federal government, in the way that they shaped what it was they were trying to do. So that was my main contribution, was in helping them shape their message to be successful in Ottawa.

And to move beyond, you know, make reference as the prime minister said in the speech from the throne, our objective is just such and such. This project we have for PEI meets exactly those concerns. We are working with you to help you achieve your goals, not we're here with our hands out, give us free money and we'll do what we want with it. And so that's what I tried to bring, was a more realistic and more balanced approach. But then you ran into people like Robert Ghiz who was the premier and says, oh Duffy doesn't know, we already have a buying of pharmaceuticals. I mean, think of why do people go to Costco? Because Costco buys in volume and wide and therefore the price goes down. So why wouldn't the four Atlantic provinces buy paint for the highways for the striped lines on the highways in common? Why wouldn't we purchase computers in common? Why wouldn't we do many things in common to get the best savings of the tax dollar and to reduce the cost to our taxpayers, run a more efficient government, just do what a normal family does? And he erupted, oh we're already doing that when it comes to pharmaceuticals. What he didn't say was over a thousand drugs in the pharmaceutical inventory, I forget what they call it, but it's the list of drugs that the provincial governments pay for. They only bought nine. Nine aspirin and stuff like that in common with the other provinces. Nine. And then Ghiz goes out with this big thing about oh yeah we're already there, Duffy doesn't know what he's talking about. I mean, trying to overcome that kind of institutional inertia and the refusal to look in the mirror.

Remember what happened when John Chrétien in 1996 brought in his budget reductions, a 40% cut in some federal government departments, right? I mean, that's going to come again. You just can't keep putting money forever. And so my argument was that the Maritimes, leave Newfoundland out if you want, they're a special case with their hydro problems and with the offshore, but just even the Maritimes, look at how many ways we could save money and it would help everybody. We've got so many people, this winter is going to be a disaster because of the high cost of propane and heating oil and so on, and people are having a hard time now. So having an efficient government isn't the Grinch that stole Christmas, it's the Grinch that tried to give something back to the taxpayer, which is some relief from unnecessary wasteful spending.

I think we need more money. I'm in favor of a guaranteed annual income, particularly for senior citizens and people who... You know what we've got now? The McDonald Royal Commission which reported in 1984 said that in addition to free trade with the United States, we should have a GAI. And I think that if you were to eliminate all of these phony baloney programs that you gotta work 13 weeks here and 12 weeks there and put this together with that and then every leap year you do something else, it's a hodgepodge. Yeah, wipe that away and give the people who need it more money. Don't, you know, what's the point of all these various obstacles? I agree anyway. So those are the kinds of things that I was trying to promote, but they would upset the apple cart and the power structure back home.

And so you've got premier saying no, I want to have all those jobs in the liquor store, we get to give them to the kids of our supporters. And in PEI they've got it right down to a system where people work half a year in the liquor store and half a year they draw EI. And it's a whole regularized system which basically means the federal government's paying half the shot. Well, the employer with EI, but it's, you know, and nobody wants to change. So when the time came to pile on, and there were lots of people with scores to settle, so yeah.

Well, I don't think you can get rid of it, so that's the first thing. I hear the argument, and most democracies have to have a system of checks and balances so that the leader doesn't have unfettered power. And we see that in the States, we see that in Britain and so on. And the way the constitution is built, there is no facility without basically unanimous consent of the provinces to get rid of the senate, and Quebec will never agree to any reduction in its power. And therefore it's an academic exercise. The elected senate, I could see some merit in that, but the premiers won't want that because right now when it comes to PEI, who speaks for PEI? Dennis King. And Dennis King is elected by I don't know how many but a few thousand people in his riding. He wasn't elected by all islanders. And so if you had an elected senate where senators were like in the United States elected in statewide elections, then they could say I speak for 15 million Ontarians as opposed to 20,000 voters or 25,000 voters in the riding of Etobicoke or wherever the current premier of Ontario is from. Right, so you'd have a literally a province-wide mandate. So who's then more important? The premier, do they become like governors in the states, minor players or less important? So the premiers will never give up the power that they get by being the spokesperson for their provinces. And the constitution makes it virtually impossible to abolish the senate.

I think there are lots of things the senate could do. The Supreme Court could, for example, tell the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court could tell the senate that the Charter of Rights should apply there. The senate's paid out millions of dollars in the last few years in harassment settlements, but that's not been in the public eye because they deny it. And when the senate recently in the last year brought in a new harassment policy, Senator Marilou McFedran, who was an expert on this, said that this is even worse than what they had before. The policy, and yet nobody was interested because it's the senate and doesn't matter. And they brought this thing in. The auditor general recommended independent oversight of senators' expenses as they have in Britain. That was gutted so that they have a so-called independent oversight body which is a partisan group which has two accountants as potential advisors to look at this, but they don't have the power.

And so as Peter Harder, who was Mr. Trudeau's appointment as the government leader in the senate, he's not doing that anymore, but when he looked at my case he said, here's a case where a bunch of senators ganged up on a guy to punish him because they didn't like him and used the rules or twisted the rules to make that possible. And that's beyond the review of the courts because the senate has parliamentary privilege. And so Harder was saying what we need is outside accountants who look at everybody's expenses and where there's a dispute they can decide whether it's within or outside the rules. The part that also doesn't get mentioned, Chris, is that in the auditor general's 2015 report which came out after I was charged but before I was acquitted, they found the leadership of the senate had themselves forged mileage claims, had hired a party planner for the Greek ball in Montreal, had done all of these things. The Liberal leader in the senate, Jim Cowan, had I think it was $29,000 of trips to Toronto he couldn't remember what they were for. Now somebody might have reminded him that his daughter had a new grandchild, but that didn't come up. He just couldn't remember. I was there on business but I can't remember what it was. And we had guys expensing flying from Winnipeg to hockey games in Montreal. These people were never punished and they're still there in the leadership of the senate. But senators have no rights under the Charter of Rights because we're a charter-free zone and the courts have upheld that. And I hope that they change that. Well, they have to do it themselves and so far they're quite happy with the club, right? As long as... and my problem was that somebody in the media who didn't understand the rules or who was maybe malicious, who knows, lumped me in with a group of other senators and of course having been well known, I was the one that attracted the attention.

So the Chrétien people have all gathered now in the Progressive Senators Group. They don't like Justin Trudeau. And if you look, that's one of the untold stories that the media either don't get, don't understand, or choose not to report. But there is a little war going on. You saw in October, Mr. Chrétien gave some interviews after the election on his new book in which he was critical of Justin Trudeau. Well, that's been simmering for years because when Mr. Trudeau came in, and particularly when the two Michaels situation came up in China, Jean Chrétien called him up and said, I left a message, when the prime minister has a minute I want to talk to him. Well, the phone rings back to Mr. Chrétien's office and it's Gerry Butts, the prime minister's chief of staff. What do you want to talk to the prime minister about? And Chrétien was enraged. How dare you, whippersnapper, I'm a prime minister, he's a prime minister, we have our own thing, right? We talk to each other. I don't need you to give me permission to speak to him. Chrétien hung up on him. And Chrétien tells the story himself. And so you've got the Chrétien people over and over again doing things and laying traps to embarrass the Trudeau crowd. And the media either don't get it or choose not to report it. Look at the overseas tax havens. Senator Percy Downe in October was in the Toronto Star with yet another big op-ed, we've got to crack down on overseas tax havens. Well, guess who one of the most famous Canadians with a tax haven would be? Think about it for a second. Why is Percy Downe pushing this issue? Paul Martin, Canada Steamship Lines. I was going to speak to our chief of... Percy Downe was Chrétien's chief of staff. They hate Martin for what he did to Chrétien, pushing him out the door. And they've been quietly stabbing the Martin people in the back. Giuliano Zaccardelli was the commissioner of the RCMP. He put out a press release saying we're investigating in 2005, I think, we're investigating Ralph Goodale who was Martin's finance minister over the income trusts. Why did Zaccardelli put that out? It was unprecedented. Because Martin had stabbed Chrétien in the back and Chrétien had appointed Zaccardelli as the commissioner of the RCMP. So it was a hit job on Martin by Zaccardelli, not because he wanted Harper in there, but he had the chance to put a shaft into Martin and he did. Percy Downe is also pushing, a Chrétien former chief of staff who's now in the senate, is now pushing or has been pushing for several years for free bridge fare between PEI and New Brunswick. Take the tolls off. Well, why would he do that? Because it's popular. People say oh great, Percy, yeah yeah, you're a man of the people. No. If you take the tolls off the bridge to New Brunswick, the federal government will stop subsidizing the ferry service in Lawrence MacAulay's riding, Kings County. There's a ferry from Wood Islands to Pictou, Nova Scotia that runs all in the good weather, 10 months, eight nine months a year. Lawrence MacAulay is a Martin-Trudeau appointee. Trudeau's got a minister of veterans affairs. Yeah, so here's the chance to stab... you know, it's the Liberal Party's internal war. And by doing something for the people, so here's Lawrence MacAulay having to say no no no no, leave the tolls on, because he's trying to protect several hundred jobs in his riding. This, you know, the most important question is always why. Why is somebody doing something? It's not just happening by accident. And that's what I tell journalism students. Why is the most important question you can ask. And they won't tell you perhaps to your face, but you ask other people behind the scenes. Why would he do that? Why is he pushing this issue? It seems out of the blue. Boom boom, no no. And sometimes bigger play, and sometimes just sometimes you have to go to the lobby of a hotel in Halifax and say you have a long distance phone call from that was Charlottetown. Yeah, Charlottetown, sorry. Anyway, so that's all.

I don't know. I've been helping some people with immigration problems. You continue to do case work. When I first went into the senate, a couple of the older hands said don't do case work, that's for the House of Commons. What I discovered was that people who have problems want somebody to talk to that they feel they know. And I was blessed that many Canadians felt they knew me and felt confident in telling me their troubles. And I had another friend of mine who was a former MLA in PEI, he said you can't make other people's problems yours or you'll drown. But at the very least you can do what my darling wife calls therapeutic listening. And so I remember one particular case, I mean there's been all kinds. COVID has shown us amazing things, Chris. How many people have spouses or significant others in other countries and they have a relationship that goes on for years where they meet in Acapulco and then they'll meet somewhere else and do their regular jobs the rest of the year and maintain, you know, with FaceTime and all this. I mean it's quite an amazing world. And then you get COVID and people say well I want to come visit or we're not technically married etc etc. And so I had a very busy time during COVID and all of that stuff trying to help people navigate through all of that. And so some of that still goes on. People still talk to me about their messaging and I'm, I guess, I'm available as a strategic communications consultant. I can't be a lobbyist, but I can tell you how to lobby or who you should call and how you should shape your message. That's permitted under the Lobbying Act. So that's what I'm doing. And this is the first time I've ever talked about what happened to me.

I've still got a lawsuit going against the RCMP, and we'll see where that goes. People seized my pay, cost me a fortune in legal fees, all because of a trumped-up political deal. And in normal circumstances in the real world, if you injure someone, you have to compensate them for their costs. And it's only because the senate doesn't have a charter of rights and is above the law that they've been able to get away with this. And so now the question will be why did the RCMP... I mean it all came out at the trial. Nigel Wright, the key witness against me, said in the interview with the RCMP, we're asking a guy to repay money he probably doesn't know. And I was confident during all of my discussions with Senator Duffy that he did not believe that anything he had done was wrong or that he had committed any crime, which is what the judge said. So the main guy that they used to try to get me on behalf of Stephen Harper said I had no criminal intent. So if anything was improper, it was by accident, not by design. And that he conceded to the Mounties I didn't owe $90,000. And so my case is very simple. If you don't owe the money, it's one thing to say for the sake of optics, you know, would you pay back a thousand dollars or something? You say well the political embarrassment. But $90,000, that's the price of a house. I'm going to do this and say it was a technical error on my part when I know it wasn't and when the rules are there and Deloitte said he didn't break any rules, he didn't do anything wrong. And yet Harper had this idea. I know you didn't break the rules. Did you hold ill will towards Stephen Harper? I feel sorry for those around Stephen Harper. I'll just leave it at that.

No, I don't hate anyone. But I feel sorry for people who have no empathy, who have no sense of right and wrong, and who put power above all else. That's not... excuse me.

Thank you. That's a tremendous compliment. And thank you. And have a great holiday season onwards and upward.