Mike Duffy’s housing allowance sideshow deconstructed — 80 days to a non-apology: Tim Harper

Others might have gone back and taken another look at what box they ticked on their Senate form when the charges were first levied.

But not if you take the typical political refuge — hunker down, run, bob, weave, dance, deny.

A truly vigilant Senate leadership could have shut this down before Christmas and a Prime Minister’s office with its antennae up could have predicted this story had staying power and needed to be dealt with quickly.

A lot of things can happen in 80 days.

Before Duffy went back and looked again, we celebrated Christmas, New Year’s, Groundhog Day, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day and Family Day.

An NHL season which was non-existent at the time is now more than one-third finished, Ontario has a new premier, a pope has resigned.

And then, and only then, did Duffy finally sit down and talk to his wife and decide this had become a “distraction” and he would pay the back money he may not have been entitled to pocket.

Except, of course, Duffy told CTV in Charlottetown he is paying the money back, which could approach $90,000, even though he doesn’t think he owes it, as if this was a laudatory act of altruism rather than a belated attempt to make a sideshow disappear.

It’s hard to characterize Duffy’s Friday television appearances, but it’s easier to determine what it was not.

It was not an apology, it was not an admission of wrongdoing and it was not a sign that Duffy understood the gravity of the situation.

He instead provided an indictment of “arcane Senate rules,’’ confusion over a form that seems to have been easily understood by most of his colleagues and an explanation that his doctors have advised him to continue care in Ottawa because, in fairness, such treatment is not available in Prince Edward Island.

Sometimes things don’t go away simply by writing a cheque after being under siege for almost 12 weeks.

If there is a learning experience for anyone here, the Duffy saga should be a textbook primer on how not to engage in damage control.

Over his 80 days, Duffy tried to discredit the reporter who broke the story, said we would all be “embarrassed” when this story was resolved and told another reporter to do some “adult work.’’

Eighty days is a long time to wait before one decides a problem is not going to go away, but there was Duffy Friday evening, telling Charlottetown television anchors (no print interviews lest his message be filtered) that, in fact, his primary residence was in Kanata, not Cavendish.

Until Friday, the former journalist was out there alone, offered no defence by the Prime Minister or his colleagues and he was perched on a wobbly reed with nowhere left to go.

So repaying the money — even though he did nothing wrong, remember — suddenly led to a hearty endorsement by the Prime Minister’s office that he is a proud Prince Edward Islander and is constitutionally able to represent the province.

It all smacks of a deal: make this mess go away and we will try to save your job.

There are still the matters of the housing allowances of disgraced senators Patrick Brazeau and Liberal Mac Harb and this can’t all be explained away by Duffy’s fuzzified explanation of a simple form in which he had to call in the accountants to find “that actually I spend more time in Kanata than I do in Cavendish and therefore my primary residence really should be Ottawa, not Cavendish ...”

The question the government does not want aired now is whether Duffy is qualified to sit as a senator from Prince Edward Island.

He owns property there and says he has spent 180 days per year on the island. He says no parliamentarian from the province spends more than half the year in the province.

In this case, this was something that should have been resolved when Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed a longtime Ottawa resident to represent Prince Edward Island.

It wasn’t and that’s why we are where we are today — in a bizarre sideshow in which it took 80 days for Duffy to figure out where he lives.