In the life of most ruling political parties there comes an event that peels back a few layers of the onion and showed what type of endemic corruption exists. Now, we're not talking about Mexican levels of corruption here with Sponsorship, or the Duffy scandal, but it pretty clearly illustrates what members of the ruling party think they have the right to do in performance of their jobs, what they think they're shielded from because of their positions of power.
For the Liberals, a relatively innocuous scandal helped create the political traction to bring them down. ~10 years later, it really looks like the same is about to happen to the Conservatives, where a "nothing" scandal that involves relatively small amounts of money, showed the inner workings of the party apparatus. The media refused to let either go, and both became election issues concerning the general trust that swing voters had for their sitting governments.
