Here’s everything you need to know about the upcoming trial of former Conservative Senator Mike Duffy, the wanly flickering star of Ottawa’s hottest scandal since Old Mother Hubbard flashed a bluestocking ankle on Sparks Street (and just as compelling): a) The rules regarding Senate expenses are too vague to prove anybody actually broke them; and b) You can hardly expect to convict someone of accepting a bribe if you’ve already declared the person who offered it to be innocent of any wrongdoing.

Anything else? Not really — although it is expected to take several weeks to flesh out the details, with the help of the innumerable auditors, officials and functionaries who will dominate the witness stand. Duffy might end up with a slapped wrist, which would be vindication compared to the outrageously unfair slagging he has so far received. But he is just as likely to emerge with head held high and the Crown’s dubious case in ruins.

In either event, the rest of us will be left wondering why this country remains so pathetically incapable of staging a decent political scandal.

Share with me for a moment a reporter’s difficulty in selling a story about the Duffy trial to the editor of a foreign newspaper:

“So there’s this essentially powerless appointee to a ceremonial position who claimed some dubious expenses, although auditors couldn’t agree on whether or not he contravened any rules. In any case, he paid back the full nut and more as soon as he was asked to.

“And now he’s on trial for eating an illicit sandwich at a ‘personal funeral’ and accepting a bribe offered by a government official who, police insist, did absolutely nothing wrong. And Prime Minister Stephen Harper was never involved in any of it, they say.

“Whaddya think? Front page?”

If “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” still reigns as the most boring headline ever written in English, “Inexplicable Canadian Non-Scandal” must rule some alternate universe as the most ridiculous ever not written.

Seven British politicians went to jail and even more were forcibly retired for their part in a similar scandal that rocked the Mother Parliament six years ago. That lot didn’t fool around: They charged taxpayers to renovate houses they routinely flipped, to build ornamental duck ponds and similar follies, to clean a personal moat and to drive all the way around the world to make the occasional 30-km trip to work and back.

Many observers blame the scandal for the fall of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2010. It rocked the country and changed the world.

Or consider the colourful ways of the recently deposed first family of Virginia, the squabbling McDonnells, whose comical greed and corruption could not be bettered by Boss Tweed himself. A Rolex watch, a Manhattan shopping spree, a daughter’s wedding: All these goodies and more they accepted from a millionaire eager for them to promote his quack weight-loss pills.

Meanwhile back in Canada, this really was a headline: “Mike Duffy charged Senate to attend personal funerals, RCMP say.”

Pause to boggle at official inanity.

Looking forward, we can expect several days of testimony adducing the malign nature of “personal funerals” and their threat to the values we all hold so dear.

Sadly, there are no Rolexes in the Duffy file. He might not have had a P.E.I. health card when it would have helped the most, but neither did he build a moat around his tiny bungalow in Cavendish. Instead, Duffy did the job the prime minister appointed him to do — and defended him for doing right up to the moment it became politically inconvenient. He swanned around the country, thumping the tub for the party, dutifully repaying the patronage that made him a senator.

But now we are expected to believe that partisan activity by senators, who are selected from party ranks and vote on party lines, is somehow improper. The proposition is as ridiculous as the institution itself.

Canada is not entirely pathetic, scandal-wise. Montreal and Toronto retain their capacity to appall with outbreaks of good old-fashioned graft, often involving considerably greater sums of cleverly extracted public funds than what go missing in national scandals. But for the most part, Canadian scandals are more about dreary incompetence than greed or sex or anything interesting.

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That, if you want, is the good news.

As for Mike Duffy: He was a disgrace to journalism long before Stephen Harper appointed him to despoil politics, but since when was that a crime?

John Barber is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Twitter @annegonian

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