By next week, ice-cold Camembert and broken crackers stand to become the new, $16 orange juice in Canadian political shorthand.

All real political controversies in Canada need a consumer item to truly grab public attention: packages of gum, embossed golf balls, Gucci shoes.

It usually takes some time, though, to figure out whether these political baubles are symbols or shiny objects of distraction.

The crackers-and-cheese reference, for those who might have missed it, comes from Sen. Nancy Ruth and her colourful complaint this week about the quality of airline food — specifically, why she might have wanted to expense a more substantial breakfast on her commute to work in Ottawa.

As for the orange juice, that comes from former minister Bev Oda, whose political career unravelled in 2012 when news reports revealed an itemized list of her expenses on an overpriced trip to London.

Crackers and Camembert will stay in the headlines over the coming week or two because the Senate is back in the news. The long-awaited trial of suspended Sen. Mike Duffy begins on Tuesday while, simultaneously, more leaks are emerging in the Auditor-General’s looming report on Senate expenses.

According to a Canadian Press report this week, senators of all political stripes have been “taken aback” by the “microscopic” attention to detail in the Auditor-General’s investigation.

The senators are right to fret: political-expense reports are rich with potential objects of public disaffection.

David Dingwall’s career at the Royal Canadian Mint was pretty much over when he put a package of gum on his expense account.

Jean Chrétien may have been absolved of any involvement in the sponsorship scandal, but the former prime minister will be forever remembered for bringing signed golf balls to the witness stand at the Gomery inquiry.

Meanwhile, the prime ministerial home at 24 Sussex Dr. has been standing shakily in need of repair since the 1980s, with none of the residents keen to take on the necessary reconstruction — all because Brian Mulroney’s renovations included space for Gucci loafers.

The common thread through all these object lessons is the theme of entitlement. No matter how many other things are broken about politics in this country, nothing grabs the public’s attention like a perceived waste of money and the sense that politicians are enjoying perks unavailable to non-politicians. (Airlines should probably be braced for an uptick in demands for Camembert and crackers on short-haul domestic flights this week.)

Take the Oda case, for instance. Old-fashioned sorts, the type who regard Parliament as a hallowed hall of democracy, might have believed that the real scandal with Oda revolved around the contempt charges she faced for faking documents presented to the Commons in 2010.

That contempt case brought down Parliament and resulted in the 2011 election, but Oda was rewarded with re-election and reappointment to the ministry when her Conservative government won a majority. Who knows? Oda might still be a minister if she hadn’t rmade the mistake of ordering an expensive glass of orange juice at the swishy Savoy Hotel in London.

Earnest people interested in Senate reform are no doubt delighted that the next two weeks will see a renewed focus on that institution. Finally, maybe we’ll get to talk about abolishing or overhauling the Red Chamber.

I wouldn’t encourage those hopes. The Senate stories, serious though they may be, are about overpriced items and entitlement — how much does it cost to keep a senator quiet — not institutional reform. Moreover, Duffy’s case will probably tell us volumes about what’s wrong with the Prime Minister’s Office, not the Senate.

The Senate itself, actually, is a shiny object — a distraction from the real, substantial problems in the House of Commons and our democracy itself.

As Nancy Ruth’s cheese-and-crackers quote was cycling through the hourly political headlines on Wednesday afternoon, for instance, MPs in the Commons were having a heated, impassioned discussion about the 93rd time the government has shut down debate to force a bill to passage.

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In this case, it was a bill to loosen gun-control restrictions. At the same time, the anti-terror bill known as C-51, with massive implications for Canadian democracy, is being rushed through the Commons. Incredibly, senior Conservatives were confiding to columnists this week that duly elected members of the opposition couldn’t be trusted to take part in parliamentary oversight of C-51.

What’s more, Parliament doesn’t have a budget in this new fiscal year and economic updates are being delivered at photo ops far away from the Commons.

More than crackers are broken in Canadian Parliament, in other words, and the odour of cynical political malaise is worse than overripe cheese. Unfortunately, though, this is not a story of people paying too much for shiny objects — unless you count the price to our democracy.

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