A Toronto judge, two veteran prosecutors, and a lion for the defence: Who's who in the Mike Duffy trial

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Ottawa’s Elgin Street courthouse has seen murder trials, terrorism cases and politicians put away for corruption. But it has never seen anything quite like the impending trial of suspended senator Mike Duffy, whose case begins April 7.

Here’s your guide to the main players.

The judge: Charles Vaillancourt

The case is to be heard by a judge alone, without a jury. Ordinarily sitting in Toronto, Charles Vaillancourt has been a judge since 1984 — first in small-claims court in Sault Ste. Marie, and since 1990 on the Ontario Court of Justice, the lower tier of courts in the province that handles the vast bulk of criminal cases.

A former teacher, Vaillancourt has worked in Ottawa from time to time: He heard the case of two police officers accused of beating homeless man Hugh Styres on a Sandy Hill sidewalk in 2011 (he acquitted the pair, finding critical testimony from two witnesses unreliable); and some years earlier he convicted a couple of 21-year-olds accused of smuggling drugs here.

Vaillancourt has dealt with sticky cases before. In 1997, he presided over the trial of New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos on assault charges stemming from a scuffle with a security guard while Kormos was staging a pushy appearance in a government office to protest a bureaucratic fumble. Along the way he had to rule on whether the Progressive Conservative attorney-general at the time, Charles Harnick, ruined the trial by talking about it in the legislature.

Harnick should have shut up, Vaillancourt ruled, but the trial wasn’t irreversibly tainted. He went on to acquit Kormos.

Vaillancourt has also delivered important rulings on who qualifies for Métis hunting and fishing rights (a difficult question because the Métis are by definition of mixed ancestry) and on how to handle criminal complainants who want to testify while wearing niqabs (he said a woman who claimed she was the victim of a sexual assault had to take off her veil to testify but that all but the essential players in the case would be moved out of the courtroom and watch her appearance on closed-circuit television).

For a story on what drives judges crazy, Vaillancourt told the Toronto Star in 1996 that his pet peeves include slow disclosure of prosecution evidence to the defence, lawyers who jump on the mannerisms of witnesses who are obviously just nervous, and spectators who try to pull stunts in the gallery – like police officers flooding a courtroom when other officers are in tough.

For the prosecution

For the trial of then-mayor Larry O’Brien, the Crown brought in a hired gun from a boutique litigation firm in Toronto. This time, it’s being handled in-house by two veteran prosecutors who are also prosecuting former Liberal senator Mac Harb this summer over his expense claims.

Mark Holmes

Holmes is one of three deputy Crown attorneys in the Ottawa office. The 51-year-old graduate of Osgoode Hall law school first worked as a prosecutor in Scarborough but moved here in 1999.

He’s handled several high-profile murder cases, including the nightclub stabbing of Oladapo Agoro in 2002. That resulted in a life sentence for killer Carl Belance. The case dragged on through three trials – an initial one, another prompted by a successful appeal but that ended in a mistrial, and a third one whose verdict stuck.

Holmes also battled for years in the case of André Jeanvenne, accused of the shotgun death of Donald Poulin back in 1983; Holmes stayed the charges before a third trial began in 2012 because Jeanvenne had been sentenced to life for another killing. And he secured a conviction for murder for drug wholesaler Fadi Saleh in the execution of dealer Hussein El-Hajj Hassan, though the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered a new trial in that case over errors in the judge’s handling of it.

Holmes prosecuted the case of Roger Clément, the former public servant who ultimately pleaded guilty to firebombing a branch of the Royal Bank in the Glebe. And he got a guilty plea from Franz Klingender, a curator at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, who was caught with child pornography on his work computer.

In 2000, Holmes argued unsuccessfully for the Crown that a father should forfeit a $50,000 bond he posted for his drunk-driving son. The son, Matt Brownlee, repeatedly breached bail conditions imposed on him while he was facing charges for drunkenly plowing into a car on Greenbank Road and killing a mother and son inside in 1996: Linda LeBreton and Brian LeBreton-Holmes, the daughter and grandson of Sen. Marjory LeBreton (who was the leader of the Conservatives in the Senate during the Duffy affair).

Jason Neubauer

An assistant Crown attorney in Ottawa since 2001, Neubauer also teaches criminal law part-time at the University of Ottawa: His courses have included a seminar on prosecuting major, complex cases. Like Holmes, he’s prosecuted his share of homicides, including getting a manslaughter conviction for Teresa Pohchoo Craig, who stabbed her domineering husband, Jack, to death in 2006. But his highest-profile cases have been frauds.

For instance, in 2013 the Dalhousie law grad got a guilty plea from Rogers TV host Neil Shah for setting himself up with a bogus law degree and bilking “clients” out of almost $2.3 million with fake investment schemes and legal bills for cases he wasn’t actually pursuing.

A couple of years before, he convicted call-girl Darquise Johnson of an $850,000 fraud against computer analyst Doug Macklem, playing on his affection for her while she cajoled, begged and threatened him – at one point claiming she was pregnant with his child – for money she shared with her husband.

In 2003, Neubauer was one of the prosecutors in the case of Harry Alexander, a former private-eye convicted of extortion in a scheme to tape former clients having sex with a prostitute so he could squeeze them for money he thought they owed him.

For the defence

This will be the biggest criminal case in Canada this spring. Mike Duffy could have had just about any lawyer he wanted to represent him. He picked Donald Bayne.

Donald Bayne

Silver-haired, courtly and stern, Don Bayne was pushed hard enough by reporters to be a little flustered at the only full press conference he’s given on Duffy’s behalf, back in 2013. In court, though, he won’t have to deal with a barrage of questions yelled at him from all directions. When he speaks, he’ll be the centre of attention, a position in which he’s extremely comfortable.

He doesn’t have the public profile of a Lawrence Greenspon or Michael Edelson, but Bayne has been a top-flight criminal defence lawyer for 36 years. A partner in Elgin Street firm Bayne Sellar Boxall, he got his law degree at Queen’s University (where he was a star football quarterback) and more recently took two years away from the law for an MBA.

He’s one of fewer than 100 lawyers in Ontario certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a criminal-law specialist, a seal of approval attesting to his experience, knowledge and “exemplary standards of professional practice.” In 2006, Canada’s Criminal Lawyers’ Association awarded him its G. Arthur Martin award for “outstanding contribution to criminal justice,” putting him in the company of multiple Supreme Court judges and legendary litigators like J.J. Robinette and Eddie Greenspan.

In fact, when criminal lawyers needed someone to speak for them all at the Supreme Court, they went to Donald Bayne. He and his partner, Norm Boxall, actually represented the Criminal Lawyers’ Association before the Supreme Court of Canada in 2009, in an argument over the details of judges’ instructions to juries.

Bayne spent years trying to keep former university professor Hassan Diab from being extradited to France to face charges he bombed a Paris synagogue in 1980. That effort ultimately failed but Bayne fought it to the Supreme Court. Along the way, he shredded the credibility of a French handwriting analyst whose testimony was key to the extradition. (Under extradition law, her evidence isn’t held to the same standard as it would have been if Diab had been prosecuted here.)

Bayne successfully defended Ontario Power Generation on charges related to the deaths of a mother and child playing in the spillway of a dam that opened when they weren’t expecting it. He’s represented men accused of war crimes abroad and RCMP officers accused of misconduct here in Canada, including speaking for Mounties in the inquiry into how Ottawa’s Maher Arar ended up sent to Syria to be tortured.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
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