OTTAWA—Less than two weeks ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper sent a shiny makeup compact to a U.S. journalist.

This week, his party was picking fights with reporters on Parliament Hill and then slamming them in fundraising letters to the Conservative base.

Clearly, this is a prime minister with mixed feelings about the media.

That’s not news — in my 25-plus years here, no prime minister has displayed any overt fondness for reporters.

But while other prime ministers regarded journalists as a necessary evil, Harper has spent considerable time and energy trying to prove they are unnecessary. And unlike other prime ministers, he has more tools at his disposal to detour right around the pesky media pack.

This summer, for instance, the prime minister announced his new cabinet appointments on Twitter, even as the appointees were pulling up in their cars to Rideau Hall.

He also flooded Twitter with snippets of a speech he gave to Conservative MPs and senators on Wednesday — the same speech his office declared off-limits to reporters; cameras and photographers only.

These detours, too, aren’t new.

A few years ago, I was trying to leave the House of Commons to reply to a message and I found the door sealed and locked. A guard explained that the prime minister intended to walk down the corridor outside and did not want anyone else in the hall, especially reporter folks.

Nor will you ever see camera shots of the prime minister arriving for work on Parliament Hill or walking through the Commons foyer — he prefers to duck in the back entrances. Why? We’re not sure, but it probably has something to do with the way Harper has tried to cast himself as a perpetual outsider to all things Ottawa.

Even after nearly eight years in power, remarking once that he’s the guy who makes the rules, Harper does not want Canadians to think that power sits comfortably on his shoulders.

Note the way his team of wordsmiths described Canadians in this week’s Speech from the Throne: “We are smart. We deplore self-satisfaction.”

We also deplore people who complain about their jobs or their working conditions, especially when they’re complaining to the people who pay their wages.

This is why you see journalists conflicted about whether to report on this ongoing feud between the PMO and the press gallery.

Whenever this subject comes up in our casual conversations, invariably someone asks: do other people get time on the news because they’re having a bad day at the office?

It’s also true that Harper hasn’t paid any political price for his hostility to reporters. During the last election, he was the least accessible leader to the national media — the infamous five-questions-a-day rule — and his party got the most votes.

But if we are going to write about it — and here we are, about 500 words into yet another piece — I think it’s time we stopped talking about this feud in terms of control or indifference.

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Conservatives have gambled, to their benefit so far, that ordinary Canadians don’t mind the media being slapped back in their place from time to time.

And if you do a Google search of the phrase “Canadians don’t care” and “Stephen Harper,” you get a rather interesting list of all the things this prime minister believes are of no interest to the public: from the fate of Afghan detainees to how many questions a politician takes from the media.

But it’s a mistake to think Harper doesn’t care about the media.

Stand back from the details of the scandal over Mike Duffy’s expenses as a once-Conservative senator, for instance, and note just how much the Prime Minister’s Office was preoccupied with the unravelling tale in the media.

It was so preoccupied with the problem, in fact, that the chief of staff, Nigel Wright, felt he had to write a $90,000 cheque to blunt the controversy. We also know now that one of the conditions of the payoff was that Duffy had to stop talking to the media.

This does not seem like an office that’s indifferent to the media or shrugging off negative coverage. Rather, it seems to speak to a certain obsession with its treatment by the media.

In that context, the letter sent to Conservatives this week — the one in which reporters were slammed as biased against Harper — was a bit of a political risk.

It sounded a bit like asking for money to deal with the jerks at the office. And what ordinary Canadian gets to do that?

I’m sure this will all blow over someday and we’ll all have a laugh about it at the office Christmas party.

But until then, I don’t think any of my media colleagues should be waiting for any more shiny gifts from the PM.

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