All about Duff: will the tawdry details eventually be too much?

If nothing else, we now know that the trial of Mike Duffy will be exhaustively chronicled, in real time, with no tawdry detail left un- Tweeted. At times Tuesday it seemed every journalist in Canada was engaged in the play by-play.

But will Canadians beyond the beltway, or south of the Queensway, tune in, get mad at the Senate fat cats and power mongers all over again? Or will they gaze through the headlines with a fatalistic, heard-it- allbefore shrug? With Election 2015 looming, this is the critical question. And the best answer is neither clear- cut nor satisfactory: It depends. For each of the major parties, including the Conservatives themselves, there are potential opportunities in this, the closest political Canada has seen to the O. J. Simpson trial, as well as the obvious pitfalls.

The consensus view, much asserted in the past 48 hours amid a cascade of setup coverage ( Five things you need to know about the Duffy Trial; Your Duffy Trial Primer; All About Duff, no Guff!), is that the trial of Mike Duffy on 31 criminal charges, including fraud, breach of trust and bribery, could be Stephen Harper’s Waterloo. It has been likened to the Gomery inquiry into the Liberal sponsorship scandal, accounts of which rocked the Liberal party in 2004- 05 and contributed to Paul Martin being held to a brief two years as prime minister. This trial comes at a most awkward time for Harper, with his bid for re- election already hampered by an economy gone soft, and his party suffering from the sclerosis common to all decade- old Canadian administrations.

Certainly there were hints in the opening statements from Crown prosecutor Mark Holmes and defence lawyer Donald Bayne that this proceeding ( set to run April 7 to May 12, break for two and a half weeks, then resume June 1 through June 19) will yield heretofore undisclosed evidence of Duffy’s astonishing appetite for the well- padded comforts of public service.

Likewise, we are certain to hear under cross- examination of Crown witnesses, and in testimony from Duffy in his own defence, that the Prime Minister’s Office in early 2013 was riddled with scheming and panicked efforts at damage control over this affair, and that a coterie of Harper’s most senior advisers at the time were hip- deep in a complex, deeply seedy and morally outrageous effort by the Conservative party to make the problem of Mike Duffy go away, by disappearing his $ 90,172 tab for improperly claimed expenses, as former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright eventually did.

It may be that, with the story told and re- told over a period of several months, and the miasma of scandal surrounding Duffy spreading outward in concentric rings to again envelop key figures in the Conservative party power structure, Canadians will simply recoil and decide to throw the rascals out, come the vote in the fall.

But then there’s the other argument, which is simply this: It’s an awful lot of storytelling about a lot of old news. The so- called smoking gun, the central question at the heart of this scandal, has always been what Harper knew of the efforts by those around him to repay Duffy’s improper expense claims.

The PM has denied repeatedly that he knew of, let alone approved of, the $ 90,172 payment by Wright. Email evidence previously disclosed suggests Harper knew in broad terms of the damage- control effort, but not the detail of the payment. And in his statement Tuesday, Bayne did not say otherwise.

Court testimony is frequently surprising, hence its inherent drama. But if this trial unfolds as a more elaborate, colourful version of what’s already been aired, the PMO will respond that Duffy is no longer a Conservative, was ousted from the party and suspended from the Senate, and that lessons have been learned and senior staff shuffled, months back.

In such a scenario, there is a better- than- even chance of Canadians not engrossed in politics tiring of the spectacle, and growing frustrated at its seemingly endless rehashing. In that event, attention will turn back to security and to the economic ballot questions, and “what have you done for me lately?” The pressure is on Finance Minister Joe Oliver, in his April 21 budget, to deliver a narrative that can supersede Duffy’s flame- thrower. Let them judge us by bread, not circuses, is the new Conservative prayer.