More from Michael Harris, available More from, available here

Stephen Harper is betting the farm that he can save the puppet show that passes for government these days with new puppets.

It won’t work. Everyone knows who pulls the strings, no matter who is offering up the speaking points on television — and the puppet-master himself is not popular these days.

In fact, he is quite unpopular. According to a recent Ipsos-Reid poll, just 30 per cent of Canadians think the Conservatives should be re-elected — the other 70 per cent believe it’s time for a change. It must be dawning on even the most unctuous party lemmings that Harper is leading them towards a Mulroney-esque abyss.

The PM’s answer, as always, is not change but optics. So Vic Toews, serial torturer of the English language and dubious defender of the public safety, may be on his way out. Peter MacKay, who built his career as a Harper minion out of fibs and photo-ops, could be close behind — though in his case it likely will be self-banishment. Environment Minister Peter Kent, who sounded most days like a climate-change denier after too many cups of coffee, could be back-benched — and not a moment too soon. Whatever credibility he brought into government is now in tatters. This dude’s teleprompter is permanently broken.

But who really cares? The real question is: Will the Harper government change its policies? For example, will it stop extending government’s reach and power, and disguising its assaults on privacy and civil liberties as public safety?

Will the PM change fighters in the middle of the jet stream and cancel the ruinously expensive F-35 fiasco, or at least have a real (as opposed to fake) review of the program?

Will the Tories stop sacrificing the environment in the name of corporate interests and perhaps signal a new course by reconsidering disastrous changes to the Fisheries Act, changes that two former Conservative fisheries ministers roundly denounced?

For that matter, will Harper allow a new fisheries minister to remove the muzzle from federal scientists, or at least set them a higher task than polishing government policy apples?

My bet is that none of this will happen. Instead, Canadians will be offered a new brigade of snake-oil salespeople selling the same old snake oil — and I repeat, it won’t work. The exercise in optics may get pulses racing inside the parliamentary precinct for a few days. Beyond that, the country will doze through the fanfare, the better to follow something that promises insight into the government’s heart of darkness: the Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy affair. Substance versus optics.

Harper is sticking to his version of events even though public details of the RCMP investigation clearly contradict him. The man who knew nothing about the Duffy deal now apparently knows more about it than the national police force … or Nigel Wright’s lawyers. Brush in hand, Stephen Harper has painted himself into a corner.

The extent to which the PM and his party have lost their way on Wright’s $90,000 “gift” to Senator Duffy is now a matter of public record.

The Conservative Party of Canada was prepared to use its war chest of donations to secretly pay off Duffy’s improperly claimed expenses — but only if the bill were $32,000, not $90,000. Ethically challenged to say the least — possibly illegal, at any price.

The deal that saw the PM’s chief of staff personally paying off Duffy’s debts was hatched two months before the external audit into the matter had been released. The integrity of the audit was apparently breached by someone familiar with Duffy’s troubles before they were made public, who then tipped off the appropriate people, including the senator. Then the Senate report into Duffy’s expenses was airbrushed by Senator David Tkachuk. Why?

The PM has been all over the map on this file. First, the government’s line was Senator Duffy had paid back the money and was displaying “leadership” in the expenses scandal. That Edsel didn’t get very far down the road.

Then Harper’s robots tried the narrative that Nigel Wright gave Duffy $90,000 because he was the soul of friendship and generosity, just trying to help out a guy who was in over his head. Stephen Harper endorsed that fiction by saying shortly after the story broke that Wright had his “confidence” and would not be resigning.

Then funny things started to happen on the way to the RCMP investigation. In the prime minister’s eyes, Senator Duffy went from being a “leader” in the expenses scandal to being a person who had some questions to answer. Gone from caucus.

Next, Nigel Wright was no longer Robin Hood and no longer had the PM’s confidence. Instead, he resigned and became the man who “acted alone” in doing the secret deal with Duffy.

Acted alone? Sounds a bit Lee Harvey Oswald, yes? But Wright’s lawyers told a story to the RCMP very different from the one that Stephen Harper told, and continues to tell, in public. The lawyers said their client told four people — three of them senior staffers in the PMO — about the bailout of the senator from Kanata: Senator Irving Gerstein, Benjamin Perrin, David van Hemmen and Chris Woodcock.

And while Wright took the blame, optically speaking, for the ultimate disposition of the senator’s financial problems, his actual words are noteworthy. He never said he didn’t talk to the PM about paying off Duffy’s improper expenses, only that he didn’t advise Harper of the “means” by which that would be done. It amounts to implausible deniability. Why would the PM contemplate any other means of paying off the debt other than Duffy repaying it himself? Has anyone asked the PM if he knew that the Conservative party was considering financing the bailout?

It comes down to this: Who has it right, the PM or Wright’s lawyers? Lawyers are not normally in the business of obstructing justice by coming up with false information from their own client during a criminal investigation, especially since Wright may yet end up a suspect rather than a witness, according to the RCMP.

As for the PM, his pronouncement is mystifying but in keeping with the guiding principle of his political hubris, Nixonian in its impertinence — that if he says it, it is so.

But this is not like defying reality after the KPMG audit shredded the PM’s numbers on the F-35 deal, or using his absolute privilege to destroy a person like Helena Guergis, even though the RCMP fully exonerated her of the aspersions cast against her. Harper is sticking to his version of events even though public details of the RCMP investigation clearly contradict him. The man who knew nothing about the Duffy deal now apparently knows more about it than the national police force which is conducting a criminal investigation into the matter, or Nigel Wright’s lawyers. Brush in hand, Stephen Harper has painted himself into a corner.

The way out isn’t a shuffle of puppets in a Harper-centric universe or kicking the Senate out of cabinet. It rests with something this government has trouble with — a little thing called the truth.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.