Don Martin blog: Mike Duffy's fall from political rock star to rock bottom

His downward spiral is almost complete.

There are now 31 criminal ways to facilitate suspended senator Mike Duffy’s fall from rock star to rock bottom.

The jaw-dropping myriad of charges laid Thursday blanket all his controversial conduct from questionable travel and housing expenses to a bogus contract for no work with a colleague to the surprise allegation of attempting to bribe a judicial officer related to the Nigel Wright affair.

The Duffy charges would not have been laid without the application of an excessive burden of proof. All of us might be equal in the eyes of the law, but high-profile public figures are more equal than others when the Crown decides to move against them.

Crown prosecutors want airtight evidence or they resist laying charges. Once charges are laid against high-profile people, they rarely cut plea bargain deals to soften the sentence lest they be perceived as going easy on celebrities.

That’s a double dose of bad news for Mike Duffy, the proud father of an RCMP officer, who is now confronting the tenacious evidence-collecting curiosity of a workaholic RCMP corporal named Greg Horton.

His lawyer’s highly unusual pre-emptive strike, proclaiming Duffy’s innocence and victimization in a letter yesterday before charges were laid, was a desperate bid to soften up Duffy’s situation before the cops stuck in a fork to proclaim his goose mostly cooked, barring a shocking case collapse.

There are sympathetic sidebars to the Mike Duffy saga, of course. His heart’s health is failing. His finances are deteriorating without a Senate salary. His options for future income are gone for good. And the distinctive visage of the former journalistic celebrity has made him a prisoner inside his home and PEI cottage.

But should the case against Duffy be upheld and he survives the grueling legal grind ahead, he will almost certainly spend time behind bars.

This is not on the same level as the fraud and breach of trust convictions of former MP Joe Fontana, who resigned in disgrace as mayor of London. Fontana escaped with mere house arrest.

That was for the relative pittance of $1,700. The Duffy allegations involve $290,000 in alleged criminal activity, including that serious charge of bribing a judicial official. The Crown will be demanding a hefty deterrent sentence upon any convictions.

This will play out on Parliament Hill in predictable, partisan style.

The Liberal and NDP reaction was to don a mask of righteous indignation over a gleefully-seized chance to dredge up every alleged connection between to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, real or imagined.

This opposition pounding will continue in the House of Commons, which returns from their summer recess the day before Mike Duffy’s charges land in court on September 16.

And what will become an increasingly weary response by Prime Minister Harper was telegraphed in his statement today, which shrugs off all future Mike Duffy comment as a criminal matter now before the courts.

Even so, the timing of the actual trial could easily mesh with the fixed election date in October 2015. That would shift the most dangerous Duffy fallout for the Prime Minister from a court of law to the court of public opinion.