The lasting impact of the Mike Duffy trial on the campaign
With one week left in the Duffy trial before an extended break until November, we go to the insiders for answers on what the latest revelations mean for Stephen Harper.
David McLaughlin is a former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney and Jim Flaherty.
While he thinks the Wright-Duffy saga will be an ongoing issue for the Conservatives, Rick Anderson, a long-time Conservative strategist currently involved in this campaign, argues the opposite.
How does this happen?
DM: They put the Prime Minister in a form of double jeopardy — damned if he knew, damned if he didn't know. That's bad staff work. In politics, especially in the Prime Minister's Office, there's no such thing as linear decision making. Decision making isn't in a straight line. It's in an elliptical, curved up and down, all over the place. You spend a lot of your time trying to make certain that people know what's going on, or don't know what's going on.
On Ray Novak:
DM: (Harper) has confidence in (Novak) and he's not prepared to let him go. Trust and loyalty is the most important currency in politics. It takes awhile to gain, and you dispense with it at your risk. But it works the other way — sometimes the most loyal thing you can do for a Prime Minister is to dispatch yourself.
So how do you fix it?
RA: The Conservative campaign knew this was going to be happening at this time, so they were able to plan around it. They're campaigning every day, making announcements, carrying on a normal campaign — so, you know, business as usual.
What can we learn from the Duffy trial?
RA: Next to the prorogation crisis in 2008-2009, this is probably the other part of Mr Harper's Prime Ministership that he will look back on 25 years from now and think, 'wow, how did I ever get in the middle of that?' Lots to learn for everybody from it, lots for pundits to chew over, for academics to analyze after the fact, for PR consultants to incorporate into their crisis communication training. This is not a textbook case for how to handle an issue, that's for sure.
Will this matter later in the campaign?
RA: We are collectively guilty of quite a large loss of perspective about the whole thing.
DM: The story just got more interesting, more exciting and, for the Conservatives in the midst of an election campaign, much more troublesome.