The question before the house is whether there is anything the Liberals could do, anything at all, that would provoke something resembling a scandal. You remember what a scandal looks like, don't you? Unruly scenes in the House of Commons. Hunted-looking ministers. Media blood lust, purged in relentless daily revelations and four-part editorials. Talk radio lynch mobs.

Parliamentary inquiries.

All but a distant memory, it seems.

After four years of one-party rule, we have forgotten how to mount a really good scandal. The occasional cry of "it's indecent" or "those bastards" rises from our lips, only to fall to the ground, awkwardly, for lack of any takers. The Grits roll on, free to do as they please, escaped from all the normal torments of democracy.

It isn't as if the government has not provided us with plenty of raw material.

In the past week alone it has offered up at least three clean chances for a good savaging: it seems almost to be taunting us.

There was, first, the appointment of Michel Bastarache to the Supreme Court of Canada. The New Brunswick judge's legal qualifications are beyond reproach, especially in the touchy field of minority language rights.

But then we read that he was a former associate of Jean Chretien's at the Ottawa law firm of Lang Michener; that he and the Prime Minister were close enough for Chretien to have written the preface to Bastarache's 1987 book on Language Rights in Canada, calling it "a remarkable research project"; that the judge, although not a party member, had helped plan Liberal strategy for the 1993 election.

None of which should call into question for a minute the judge's integrity or independence -- though his enthusiastic support for the Charlottetown Accord (as national co-chairman of the Yes committee, no less) might raise doubts about his judgment. But one can't help wondering: suppose Brian Mulroney had appointed an old legal buddy and Conservative party strategist to the highest court in the land. Suppose he had done so, moreover, at the moment when it was most critical that the court be free of even the slightest suspicion of partisanship. Would his appointment have been greeted with the same unnerving calm that marked the Bastarache announcement?

Second example. We learn, six months after the fact, that certain individuals presenting themselves as agents for the Liberal Party of Canada went about the province of Quebec just before the election soliciting campaign contributions from businesses that had applied for aid under the federal Transitional Jobs Fund. We learn, further, that among those involved in the influence-peddling scheme was allegedly a Liberal organizer in the part of Quebec that includes the Prime Minister's riding; and that even after party officials had been informed he was being investigated by the RCMP, he was kept on the party payroll.

We learn that the Prime Minister's Office was alerted to the existence of the scheme by Human Resources Minister Pierre Pettigrew, as were two other senior ministers from Quebec and the commissioner of the RCMP -- but not, curiously, the Solicitor General, the minister responsible for the police force.

Curious, because the minister insists it would have been improper for him to have been informed. Yet in the matter of the RCMP's inquiries into the Airbus affair, it was the Prime Minister who was supposedly kept in the dark, while the Solicitor General was fully apprised -- an arrangement defended with the same stout insistence that any other approach would have been improper.

Yet given what we already know about all this -- about the influence peddling itself, the continuing employment of a key alleged figure in the scheme, the contradictions between the government's handling of this inquiry versus the Airbus affair -- the story plays page three.

Third example. It is revealed, more or less offhandedly, that the Solicitor General has routinely authorized the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to use wiretaps to spy on persons suspected of engaging in "activities constituting a threat to the security of Canada" -- without first having to present evidence before a judge justifying the surveillance. This is exactly the sort of antic spookery that CSIS was set up to prevent, in the wake of the McDonald Commission's inquiries into RCMP wrongdoing in the 1970s.

But that was in the days when the country was capable of rousing itself to some sort of indignation.

There still remains the Somalia inquiry, abruptly terminated in the spring just as it started to close in on certain prominent Liberal appointees. Some Conservative senators are trying to relaunch the inquiry in the Red Chamber.

They will probably fail. Nothing will be made of it.