Prime Minister Stephen Harper is betting that most Canadians don’t care who knew what when about the Senate spending scandal. He’s also betting that voters will be pleased to see three senators widely viewed as fat cats cast out in the cold.

These are cynical calculations. They may also be correct.

If Harper is wrong on the first bet, he’s in deep trouble. His insistence that he knew nothing about the complex web of arrangements surrounding his government’s attempts, first to first protect Mike Duffy from scrutiny and then to throw the embattled senator overboard, defy belief.

They defy belief because so many people close to the prime minister are known to have been involved.

This information is not new. RCMP documents made public in June revealed that the matter of Duffy’s expenses was top of mind not only in the prime minister’s office but at the most senior levels of the Conservative Party.

Indeed, in the early days, the only question seems to have been whether the party itself would cover Duffy’s dubious expense claims in order to squelch a potential political scandal involving the then Conservative senator, or whether some other source of funding would be required.

That Harper, a notoriously hands-on leader, knew nothing of these discussions is impossible to believe, regardless of his denials.

But does the possibility that Harper misled Parliament and the nation on this question matter greatly to voters? I’m not sure it does.

Right now, there are two stories at play in the Senate scandal. The first is the how-much-did-Harper-know story. That’s being pushed by the opposition New Democrats and Liberals.

The second is whether the Senate’s Conservative leadership is being fair in its efforts to suspend, without pay, Duffy, Pam Wallin and Patrick Brazeau from the upper chamber.

This is the story promoted by the three senators as well as their supporters. Duffy argues that since he has a heart condition, the loss of his Senate health benefits would be unduly punitive. Wallin makes a similar point, noting that she is a cancer survivor.

Such pleas have resonated among senators and even some Conservative MPs. But I doubt they will cut much ice with most voters.

Most voters don’t enjoy the gold-plated supplementary health plans available to senators and MPs. Most voters, including heart attack victims and cancer survivors, make do quite nicely with medicare.

I wish Duffy and Wallin nothing but the best. But as residents of Ontario, both qualify for OHIP. If Duffy suffers heart problems, he can receive excellent care in Ottawa’s top-notch hospitals. As a senior citizen, he is also eligible for heavily subsidized pharmaceuticals courtesy of the Ontario Drug Benefit Plan.

Wallin has not yet hit the magic age of 65. But she too can be assured of OHIP-paid physician and hospital care and — should she become penniless — access to free prescription drugs.

The other argument used in the fairness story is one of due process. Those opposed to summarily suspending the senators and cutting off their pay argue that the procedures being followed are fundamentally unfair — that they contravene the charter of rights and freedoms.

I don’t know whether that argument is legally valid. I do know that no one raised the charter of rights when Brazeau was summarily suspended from the Senate, albeit with pay, in February (that suspension ended automatically when Harper prorogued Parliament this fall.

Which suggests that the fuss this time has less to do with denying duly appointed legislators the right to carry out their duties and more with the loss of their $135,200 sessional stipends.

If the fairness of financially penalizing Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau remains the dominant issue, then Harper is politically safe. There’s not much sympathy for this well-paid trio of senators out here where most of us live.

The Twitterverse may be outraged at the unfairness of it all. The Twitterverse was outraged (correctly in my view) when Harper, in 2008, arbitrarily prorogued Parliament to prevent his government’s defeat in the Commons.

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But when the next election rolled around, it turned out that voters didn’t much care.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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