OTTAWA—The federal ethics commissioner Mary Dawson says Stephen Harper’s former top aide Nigel Wright breached the federal Conflict of Interest Act when he sought to repay Sen. Mike Duffy’s questioned expenses.In a report released Thursday, more than a year after Justice Charles Vaillancourt cleared Duffy in the controversial senate expenses affair, Dawson fingers Wright for blame on two fronts.She said the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper first tried to get the Conservative party to pay off the senator’s debt – which it appeared ready to do when the amount was believed to be $32,000.When Duffy’s bills were added up including interest, the tab ran to more than $90,000 and the party balked.Dawson rejected Wright’s defence that he was acting in a partisan capacity when he turned to former Sen. Irving Gerstein, chair of the Conservative Fund of Canada, to repay Duffy’s politically embarrassing expenses.“I am of the opinion that in his communications with Sen. Gerstein, Mr. Wright used his position as chief of staff to the prime minister to seek to influence Sen. Gerstein and the Conservative Fund Canada to reimburse Senator Duffy’s living expenses,” Dawson writes.When that didn’t work, and Wright, an independently wealthy investment banker who was trained as a lawyer, decided to use his own funds to transfer the amount owed to Duffy’s lawyer to pay off the debt, that was another violation of the conflict rules that he “should have known” was not allowable, she said.“By providing funds to Sen. Duffy in return for his commitment to meet the conditions set out in the agreement, Mr. Wright knew or ought to have known that he was improperly furthering Sen. Duffy’s private interests. I am of the opinion that similar reasoning applies in the case of Mr. Wright seeking to influence a decision of any person to make payments that had th ...
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