“Are you embarrassed by the way the Duffy-Wright incident was handled by your prime minister’s office?” asked a reporter at Stephen Harper’s press conference in Mississauga yesterday.

The questions for Harper are getting more pointed on the campaign trail these days, despite a kind of choreography by the prime minister’s “away team,” designed to prevent them from being so.

When Bill Davis called the 1971 Ontario election, he stayed in the media studio for an hour to answer reporters’ questions. Harper answered his traditional five questions then left. Davis had frequent and lengthy interactions with reporters every day on the hustings. Compare that to the operation employed by the current prime minister’s team. There is one brief media availability whenever Harper is doing a campaign event, and then only five questions are permitted, and the prime minister’s people decide who asks them. The other federal leaders do not employ such techniques, but rather take questions from whoever asks them and certainly take more than five questions per availability.

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Here's how the Conservatives do their “media avails” differently from the other parties. Instead of finishing the campaign event, then moving the prime minister to a different area for media Q&A, the Conservatives keep the PM in place at his lectern, they keep the “wallpaper” of people behind the leader, and they keep the audience of screened, partisan supporters (in other words, no members of the general public) in place as well.

The choreography is designed in part to intimidate reporters who, in the past, have gotten booed by Conservative Party supporters when they ask questions the crowd doesn’t like.

An event yesterday in the riding of Etobicoke Centre went even further. Whenever reporters have asked about the Duffy trial, the PM has offered a stock answer he now constantly gives, regardless of what the question is. And the questions have been getting more specific as each trial day presents new details of the PMO’s efforts to manage that crisis.

Harper always answers by mentioning that this was a Mike Duffy/Nigel Wright operation and the justice system rightly has the two of them in its crosshairs. Except that every day, we’re learning new information that plenty of people beyond those two knew about the $90,000 cheque written by Wright to make the nasty mess go away, including testimony yesterday suggesting the PM's current chief of staff Ray Novak knew.

“How is it possible that two weeks after Mr. Wright gave Mr. Duffy the cheque, and many other people knew about this, you continued to say that they were the only ones that knew?” another journalist asked.

Again, Harper dodged with his stock answer.

Yesterday, some people in the crowd started heckling the media when they started asking questions about the trial. Even Harper tried to silence the hecklers by raising his hand twice and saying “okay, okay.” But it didn’t stop. And after the short news conference was over, one Conservative partisan gave the media a piece of his mind, shouting at reporters from CTV and CBC and calling one “a lying piece of sh--.”

“Ask questions on the topic at hand,” another shouted at the media, who actually aren’t obligated to ask questions about the topic at hand, but rather, about topics that are either newsworthy or in the public’s interest.

Harper’s communications director Kory Teneyke apologized on behalf of the party, but of course, he’s the same guy who stage manages these press conferences to ensure that the PM is surrounded by loyal supporters, who clearly don’t like the media's line of questioning.

The irony of these “five questions and out” press conferences is that Harper is a solid, disciplined performer at them. He's expert at getting the message out he wants to get out, never loses his cool, and performs extremely well.

Given that the media are only permitted to ask five questions (in both official languages), of course they're going to ask about the Duffy trial. Is it possible that if the PM took more questions, he'd actually get inquiries about other topics? I guess we'll never know.

Every prime minister has legitimate security needs and this one is no exception. But the efforts undertaken to ensure that this prime minister never has any contact with any Canadian not vetted by his political machine is extraordinary. And these aren't security checks, they're political thought checks. Those who are vetted to attend are even warned not to take pictures or videos with their cell phones. Election campaigns are actually supposed to be the time when average citizens can interact with the country's political leaders to help them make their electoral choices.

The Duffy trial continues. The media’s questions are getting tougher. The prime minister looks less and less amused during his press conferences. His partisans are getting more and more irritated at the media. The Conservative security apparatus is getting more and more skittish (witness a reporter getting booted out of a rally in Richmond, BC last week).

If things keep going this way, things are really gonna get ugly.

Image credit: Twitter/@pmharper