PM’s lawyer says he believed Harper knew about Duffy deal

Perrin, a University of British Columbia law professor, also emphasized that he was in the room during the conference call with Wright and Harper’s longtime adviser and current chief of staff, Ray Novak.

In response to other queries about Novak, Mr. Harper replied on Thursday that “there is one person on trial here. Duffy can be repaying voluntarily his personal disputed bills out of his personal pocket”, Perrin advised the courtroom. And Wright said he told Harper was that he was going to get Duffy to repay in order to set a precedent that errant senators would be held accountable, but didn’t go into specifics.

During former chief of staff Nigel Wright’s six days of testimony it emerged that Novak was informed about Wright’s plan to repay Duffy’s expenses.

“Generally anything that’s a rally motivates the troops and allows people to see the real Stephen Harper“, Truppe said. While Wright was not charged with giving Duffy the $90,000 to repay his expenses, the Crown alleges Duffy tried to extract the cash by setting the terms.

Perrin remains in the witness box on Friday. “Specifically, new testimony may indicate that Mr. Wright and Mr. Novak communicated via BlackBerry PINs and BlackBerry messages in the past, and as recently as two weeks ago”, LeBlanc wrote.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said it is time either for Novak to quit or for Harper to fire him.

Ask anyone retiring or retired if their hard work has won them some semblance of financial security like the one that awaits our dear leader and his cronies.

Neither Teneycke nor Novak, both of whom are travelling with the Conservative campaign, responded Thursday to requests for comment. Carolyn Bennett said way back in December of 2010: “For someone who vowed never to appoint an unelected Senator, Mr. Harper is now the all-time patronage king, having appointed 38 Conservative activists to the upper chamber”.

Wright did all the talking, saying a previous agreement to have an audit of Duffy’s expenses rendered moot had fallen through.

Perrin says he was asked to study the question of a person’s qualifications for representing a province in the Senate. He added he had detected no “whiff of criminality” up to that point, and if he had, he said he would not have agreed to it. “If pushed by Wright, I would have gone to the PM”. So do you still have complete confidence in your chief of staff Ray Novak, why or why not?

Duffy has pleaded not guilty to 31 charges of breach of trust, bribery and fraud, partly related to his claims that Cavendish, P.E.I. was his primary residence rather than Ottawa, the city in which he has lived since the 1970s.

By the time the Deloitte issue came up, he wanted Wright to know how keen he was to be removed from the file, but that wasn’t going to happen, as he was the only lawyer around.

“As counsel in the matter, I was clearly left in the dark”, he said.

Bayne questioned Perrin about Duffy’s reluctance on February 20, 2013, when the senator was putting up resistance in his negotiations with the PMO.

Case in point: the angry Harper supporter who launched into a profane diatribe against reporters for their insistence on pressing the prime minister about the embattled senator.