OTTAWA—Prime Minister Stephen Harper has revised his version of events around what he and his office first characterized as an “inappropriate” and “inadvisable” phone call by the country’s top judge over a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Now Harper suggests he foresaw a court challenge and legal issue he previously said “surprised” him and his advisers because it had “never arisen” before. Earlier, Harper had characterized a call by Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin as inappropriate, just as any minister’s call to a judge would be on a case that was before the courts.

On Wednesday, Harper appeared to suggest he simply didn’t need to speak to McLachlin.

“The fact of the matter is this,” Harper told the Commons Wednesday. “A matter came before me that I thought was likely to come before the court — the Supreme Court of Canada — based on information that I had. For that reason we completed our consultations with outside legal experts and later referred the matter to the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court of Canada has clarified the call was made July 31. That was two months before any court case arose, during a period of consultations between the government and the legal and judicial community over who should fill the Quebec vacancy.

At the end of September, Harper named Marc Nadon to the high court, prompting a legal challenge by a Toronto lawyer, an outcry in Quebec, and an eventual move by the Conservative government to retroactively change the law to allow the appointment. It referred the case to the high court and at no point questioned McLachlin’s ability to render a fair ruling.

Harper did not specify Wednesday what “information” he was acting on to conclude that the matter was “likely” to come before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Justice Minister Peter MacKay told the Star last week that the government sought the outside legal opinions after McLachlin flagged the legal issue to him in a call on July 31.

MacKay has also previously told the House of Commons that, “prior to the ruling” of the top court, there was nothing in the act that “prohibited the appointment of a Supreme Court judge who had come through the Federal Court.”

On Wednesday, New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair asked Harper to respond to a chorus of calls outside the Commons to withdraw the remarks and apologize to McLachlin.

Those calls have come from the Canadian Council of Law Deans, former heads of the Canadian Bar Association, and some 650 lawyers and law teachers who wrote an open letter to Harper Tuesday to deplore his attack on McLachlin. Separately, a group of top legal academics has asked the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva to investigate what they call the Conservative government’s “unfounded criticisms leveled at the chief justice.”

Harper said he “rejected the premise” of the question, and also declined a direct answer when Mulcair demanded who in the PMO suggested to Marc Nadon, Harper’s ultimately rejected candidate, to quit the Federal Court of Appeal and rejoin the Quebec bar in order to qualify for elevation to the Supreme Court of Canada.

“I received constitutional opinions saying that we could appoint judges from the federal court to the Supreme Court directly, that’s what we did in that case,” Harper replied.

Brent Rathgeber, an independent MP, lawyer and former Conservative MP who vetted two previous Supreme Court judicial appointments for Harper, said Harper has clearly changed his message.

“The narrative now is, ‘There was no need for me to talk to the chief justice because I was already aware of the issue, as opposed to the original narrative, which was, ‘It would have been inappropriate for me to talk to the chief justice,” Rathberger said in an interview. “Now it’s changed to, ‘It would have been redundant and unnecessary for me to speak to the chief justice.’”

“And I’m fairly confident the reason they changed that narrative is that they know they messed this one up, that they crossed the line and that their insinuation that the chief justice in her administrative (heads-up) acted inappropriately was beyond the pale, over the top and unacceptable by the entire legal, judicial and media communities.”

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Rathgeber and other legal observers say that if Harper or MacKay really believed at any point that McLachlin had formed an opinion or prejudged a case that the government eventually sent to the high court, they had a professional duty or obligation set out in the Supreme Court of Canada rules to inform the court and ask McLachlin to recuse herself when the federal reference opinion was sought.

Rathgeber says he doesn’t believe any of that was the case. He says McLachlin acted appropriately, and the story that she did not is “pure PMO spin created nine months after the fact.”

He said the government has lost control of the story and is trying now to backtrack in the face of near unanimous condemnation.

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