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At the same time, she said the urge to howl for blood at the first sign of trouble is damaging to a civic system, and could discourage good people from joining up. “It’s hard enough already,” she said.

“We tend to think right away about resignation, and falling on your sword, and doing the humble thing,” said Mr. Lee Crowley. “I think that’s terribly important and we don’t do enough of it, but I think there’s an intermediate step, which is the apology. I think we’ve completely lost the art of the apology.”

One reason, he said, is a “macho” distaste for the perceived weakness of contrition, and so instead the electorate gets what Mr. Lee Crowley calls “weasel” apologies, in which the audience is blamed for taking offence. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien was a good example of the macho stance, he said, by refusing to acknowledge any accountability for the sponsorship scandal.

For his part, as the Senate expenses scandal claimed his own chief of staff, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was “sorry that this has occurred,” but also angry, as if he were the victim, deserving of an apology himself, as if someone ought to be accountable to him.

Marjory LeBreton, the Conservative leader in the Senate, was similarly defiant in her response this week to the expenses scandal, saying that if the party had not shone a light on senators’ spending habits, there would be no “hyped-up media stories about spending abuses.”

“I am a Conservative and I know more than most that around this town populated by Liberal elites and their media lickspittles, tut-tutting about our government and yearning for the good old days, that we are never given the benefit of the doubt and are rarely given credit for all the good work that we do,” she said.

That is the rub, for the elected politician. Frustrating though it must be, accountability in its purest form is less about a pat on the back than a kick in the rear.