[ISL] Jason Markusoff on watching Mike Duffy in Cavendish, PEI

[rfmcdonald]

In a MacLean's article, Markusoff reports on how locals are reacting to the whole Duffy affair.

As a local history book—and the local Simpsons, McNeills and Clarks—will assert, the community of Cavendish was founded by three families 225 years ago. Those are still common surnames among the roughly 250 year-round residents of this northern Prince Edward Island hamlet made famous by Lucy Maud Montgomery and her visits to a McNeill-owned farm named Green Gables.

Drawn by the Anne lore and the beaches, Cavendish swells each summer by thousands of cottagers and tourists, substantially diversifying the pool of surnames. Among them are the Duffys of 10 Friendly Lane, perhaps the most prominent residential address of this campaign after 24 Sussex.

Islanders were suspicious from the start of Sen. Mike Duffy’s insistence that he could represent P.E.I. When word got around that the P.E.I.-born, Ottawa-based broadcaster had claimed Cavendish as his primary residence, George Clark-Dunning found out which house it was from one of the McNeills. One spring day, Clark-Dunning, a retired hotelier, left his family stead to walk past Memory Lane, G. Willikers Gift Shop and Green Gables to get to the Duffy cottage. Shopping bags covered the home’s light fixtures, a telltale sign of tourists at the end of the season, he said.

As controversy gathered around their occasional neighbour, Cavendish year-rounders learned that the senator and his wife had post-facto obtained provincial driver’s licences and health cards for the island of their supposed primary residence. “To us, it was just the birthday candles on the icing on the cake,” Clark-Dunning said.

The notoriety and criminal charges haven’t made the Old Duff a summertime recluse. Weeks before his trial resumed in August and pulled him back to his once-subsidized “secondary residence,” Duffy not only attended but spoke out with concern at a public meeting about the particularly raucous and boozy aftermath of this July’s Cavendish Beach Music Festival.

Some in Cavendish remain supporters or friends, and Islanders are too genteel to make Duffy feel unwelcome during his summer stay, Clark-Dunning said. “And there are people who are standing by him in this, definitely, so if you think he’s about to be dropped into the deep fat like a good doughnut, you just smile politely and keep your mouth shut. True gentlemen just don’t get into it.”