A Senate motion to call in the RCMP to look into Mike Duffy’s billing practices was essentially a ritual sacrifice designed to deflect the wrath of the gods of public opinion.

The RCMP did not wait for a committee of senate high priests to involve it in its public efforts to exorcise the demon of an ongoing spending scandal to take an interest in the Senate spending issue. In a May 12 statement, the force indicated that it was looking into whether a full-fledged investigation was warranted.

Once it decides it does have a trail worth following, the police will pursue the evidence wherever it leads and that is a lot more than the Senate itself was prepared to do until this week.

But a police inquiry will still leave unexplored the large grey zone within which concerted political transgressions tend to take place.

Watching the Conservatives on the committee wash their hands of their former celebrity colleague on Tuesday evening one could not but be reminded that the senators who are eager to demonize him this week were casting Duffy as a model of leadership only a few days ago.

If CTV had not brought to light the fact that the top aide to the Prime Minister’s Office had personally reimbursed the $90,000 Duffy pocketed by wrongly claiming a P.E.I. summer cottage as his main residence, matters might well have stopped there.

Tuesday’s discussion of an apparent pattern of double billed travel expenses would have taken place in private — if at all.

As part of an independent audit on Duffy’s expenses, Deloitte auditors used his cellphone records to track his comings and goings. In 49 instances, between April 2011 and March 2012, his location was at odds with his claim that he was attending to Senate business in Ottawa.

One can only wonder whether there are many more senators who have been operating on the assumption that they were granted the gift of ubiquity upon entering the upper house.

To this day the Senate majority does not seem inclined to connect more than the obvious dots. The same is true of the ruling party in the House of Commons.

Tuesday was clearly a day of reckoning for the Conservatives in both houses of Parliament. It featured a government that was still trying to find its footing in a minefield of its own making.

By Wednesday, it was more apparent that Stephen Harper and his team will be using the RCMP investigation as yet another reason to keep the exact circumstances surrounding their extraordinary handling of the Senate file behind a smokescreen.

If more definitive light is going to be shed on this episode, it is unlikely to come directly from the government.

For all the drama of the past two days on the Hill, the actual developments to date amount to a series of kicks at already opened doors.

But it is not for lack of the Opposition trying.

Over the past two question periods, official Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair has been at the top of his prosecutorial game. As an aside, now that Bob Rae has relinquished the lead Liberal role to Justin Trudeau, the NDP leader clearly is the dominant Opposition figure in the House. And now that Mulcair is asking short pointed questions he may have less need of the crutch of a lectern.

But part of the reason why Mulcair played to such rave media reviews has to do with the fact that he was performing the kind of basic journalistic duty that the press corps has systematically been prevented from undertaking by the current government.

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For the generation of parliamentary reporters who came to the federal beat on Harper’s watch, the notion of regular Parliament Hill prime ministerial press conferences is the stuff of urban legends.

These days even the Prime Minister’s belated presence in the House — more than a week into a major crisis involving his own office — is deemed to be a notable event.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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