Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s affinity for political hardball is well-known.

Politics is a tough profession and Harper, like many successful practitioners of the art, has few qualms about getting down and dirty.

But increasingly, there is an outrageous element to Conservative partisanship — a craziness that borders on pathology.

Think Richard Nixon.

Like the former U.S. president, Harper has an ambitious agenda.

Nixon normalized relations between the U.S. and Communist China. Harper recalibrated Canada’s relationship with NATO, Israel, the United Nations and South America.

Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Harper has made the boldest effort of any prime minister in living memory to wean Canada from its economic dependence on the U.S.

In a long, bloody and roundabout way Nixon extricated most American troops from a war in Vietnam that he supported. For his part, Harper effectively ended Canadian military involvement in the Afghan War — a war he once called both just and necessary.

While Nixon wasn’t adored, his followers respected him. That and the utter disarray of his political opponents allowed him to win two elections handily.

Ditto for Harper, except that he won three.

By 1973, Nixon was headed for the history books as one of America’s great, if controversial, presidents.

But then he was derailed.

The proximate cause of Nixon’s derailment was the scandal known as Watergate. The real cause was his own paranoia, his insistence on political overkill and his willingness to have operatives commit dirty tricks that were beyond the law.

Is Harper heading down this path? Let’s just say there are worrying signs.

Like Nixon, Harper has a bitter side. He is unforgiving. His visceral dislike of his political enemies — particularly the Liberals — can be over the top

Nixon had an enemies list. As my colleague Tim Harper pointed out this week, so does Canada’s Conservative government.

Cindy Blackstock, an advocate for aboriginal children, ended up on this enemies list for criticizing Ottawa’s approach to natives.

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Nixon used the resources of the White House to commit burglary. The Harper government, according to a report by Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, used its information technology staff to access Blackstock’s private Facebook page and monitor her postings.

Indeed, the most chilling element of Stoddart’s report on the Blackstock affair is the suggestion that this government routinely uses its IT professionals to monitor the on-line musings of private citizens.

There is even an official “website access request form” that would-be bureaucratic snoops must fill out.

Nixon had his henchmen commit dirty tricks against political enemies. Canada’s equivalent is the robocall scandal. The final word on this is still not in. And no political party is entirely innocent. But we do know two things.

First, a federal court judge found that the Conservative party database was used to commit electoral fraud. In particular, Justice Richard Mosley found that unknown persons used automated telephone calls to deter non-Conservative voters from casting ballots in 2011.

Second, we know from both Mosley and chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand that the Conservative party has done its best to obstruct any investigation into this robocall scandal.

Finally, the Senate. Harper wants to close the book on this scandal. It is still open. Again the elements have a Nixonian quality. The plot goes something like this:

Sen. Mike Duffy is a valued Conservative stalwart. But his spending irregularities threaten to embarrass the government. As a result, the prime minister’s chief of staff approaches two Conservative senators — including one Harper loyalist — charged with investigating Duffy.

The chief of staff then pays Duffy $90,172 to cover the expenses. The compliant senators obligingly produce a whitewashed report. Throughout, the prime minister insists he knows nothing.

Nixon, too, claimed innocence. In the end he was undone by a White House taping system that recorded for posterity everything said in the oval office. We can only hope that Harper has a similar regard for the needs of history.

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

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