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.

Scandal, like a nuclear reaction, has to reach critical mass before a chain reaction sets off an explosion.

Public outrage over the Ad Sponsorship kickback scheme wasn’t a one-off. It operated on the long fuse of the gun registry boondoggle, the tainted blood scandal, the Somalia and APEC coverups, millions in untendered contracts to Bombardier, the election gag-law, hundreds of missing millions in HRDC, and, of course, Shawinigate.

Just before the mushroom-shaped cloud appears over a political party, there is usually a let-them-eat-cake moment. For the Liberals, it was when Jean Chrétien said, “I take my pepper on my eggs and steak.”

And so to “robocalls,” dirty tricks, and the hue and cry of election fraud. Has Pierre Poutine nudged the Conservatives closer to political fission?

The prime minister says no.

This week, he offered up a quasi-reprise of one of Brian Mulroney’s more doomed roles – a PM staunchly defending his government against allegations of wrongdoing by placing the burden of proof entirely on his critics. It is a very old playbook used by established power everywhere when it finds itself under attack – deny the charges and admit nothing. Challenging your opponents to do your dirty laundry can end in an embarrassing display on the public clothesline. For Mulroney, it ended in the loss of his Ontario minister, his House Leader, and his own personal reputation for honesty.

History didn’t deter Stephen Harper. He gazed wide-eyed at the House Speaker this week and invited the Opposition to turn over any evidence of electoral fraud they might have to Elections Canada or the RCMP. Like parrots in suits, an array of Conservative acolytes repeated their leader’s mantra. There was only one problem. The Conservative Party, not the opposition, holds all the decisive evidence of possible systematic election fraud. The PM’s request was absurd.

The obvious is rarely mentioned in news coverage but here it is. The best way for the Conservatives to put an end to this story would be for the prime minister to table all the contracts the party awarded in the last election dealing with the farming out of the Tory message, including the ones to Responsive Marketing Group Inc. (RMG) and RackNine.

On the phone-centre front, what companies were hired and what were their marching orders? Who wrote the scripts provided to call-centre employees in Thunder Bay in those critical last days before the election? Was Conservative worker bee Michael Sona really the peach-fuzz Machiavelli behind all this? If election fraud was indeed somebody else’s idea, (the infamous Poutine?) the documents would make that clearer than it is today. Where are they?

The prime minister has some reason to believe that stonewalling might work. The Opposition, for example, might blow itself up with the high explosive of all oppositions, its own hyperbole. Contrary to what some MPs said this week, no one knows if this is the biggest election fraud in Canadian history or small poison from the cesspool of modern politics. Nor is the government the only entity that has to answer questions about Tory call-centre employees hoodwinking unsuspecting voters with false information.

Annette Desgagne, the RMG employee who may yet emerge as the Alan Cutler of this story, says that she complained at the time to her supervisor, to the RCMP, and to Elections Canada about those misleading phone-calls. What, if anything, did they do? And is there any truth in Senator Mike Duffy’s observation that an over-zealous third party, a kind of nefarious super-PAC that lost its bearings in the U.S. primary season and strayed north of the border, might have done the dirty work? As for the people in glass houses throwing all those stones, didn’t the NDP treat Lise St-Denis to a telephone flash mob when she jumped ship to the Grits? And weren’t the Liberals behind the not so magical or mystical Twitter tour of Vic Toew’s private life?

That said, this is dangerous ground for the Conservatives. The Harper government is no longer awaiting its first communion. The dewy-eyed resolve to usher in an era of transparency in government has all but disappeared into its sixth year of soundproofing Canadian democracy. Mr. Harper’s denials in the current controversy are offered against the backdrop of a record that looks more like a rap sheet, including an unprecedented contempt of parliament finding against his government.

This is also the government that rigged the system to exceed spending limits in the 2006 election, denying any wrongdoing until some of its members entered a guilty plea to lesser charges of violating financing provisions of the Elections Act. This they called “a great victory.” Even as far back as his days with the National Citizens Coalition, Harper has had nothing but disdain for Elections Canada, memorably referring to its long time boss Jean-Pierre Kingsley as a “jackass.”

And then there is that other case featuring the same crime and the same weapon – a deceit campaign against Liberal MP Irwin Cotler in Mount Royal carried out by telephone. Senior federal Conservatives initially defended their unscrupulousness by an appeal to free speech. Even the Conservative Speaker of the House of Commons couldn’t choke that one down, referring to the tactic as “reprehensible.”

And remember those fake photos of Michael Ignatieff worked off on Sun Media by the Tory machine purporting to show that the already doomed Liberal leader was thick as thieves with Pentagon war planners? And if altered documents, fake photos, fake new Canadians, and the odd former felon on the PMO staff pass muster, why not fake Election Canada calls?

Will we ever get to bottom of this story? The prime minister says he wants to but not even Christopher Plummer could make that line believable coming from the Tories. Waterboarding might get Stephen Harper to admit his name, but that’s about it. If it’s left up to a government internal investigation, we’ll get as many facts about Robogate as we got about the Afghan detainee affair, the gun registry, or that albatross with a jet engine known as the F-35.

What about other investigations? The RCMP has never been as politicized as it is today and no one expects the Force to do anything heroic, especially when their investigative priority is to gets it members to keep their zippers up and leave their female colleagues alone. In past political investigations, the Force missed the elephant in the room in the Airbus investigation, even providing the transportation for Brian Mulroney to a Montreal airport hotel where he picked up a dollop of his pasta money.

As for Elections Canada, it is still silent about documented complaints it has received from a number of residents of Vaughan about alleged irregularities in Associate Defense Minister Julian Fantino’s by-election victory in Vaughan. The critics, who made their complaints in affidavit form, still don’t know if it was okay for the candidate to be depositing campaign contributions into two riding association bank accounts. And as for those three telephone calls from Vaughan to robo-guys at RackNine, why did they come from Fantino’s constituency office and not his campaign headquarters? Was Fantino, like a dozen or so other Tory candidates, a client of Matt Meier? If not, what were those calls about?

That puts the whole thing back in the nuclear stew of public opinion. Will the Harper government’s sins and misdemeanors reach critical mass over the chippy months ahead and bring on electoral Armageddon? Or will the whole thing dissipate in an enervating combo of opposition overkill and public apathy?

The government has reason to be optimistic. This is a venal, perfidious, and power-worshipping age, as the News of the World scandal in the U.K. has lain bare. Police, journalists and politicians participated in a mutual wallow of greed and betrayal in which their public responsibilities were pimped out for money and influence. Yet when Rupert Murdoch published his first Sunday Sun this past weekend, the man at the heart of the phone-hacking scandal experienced a little critical mass of his own, a mass circulation of 3.2 million paid copies for his inaugural – the highest sales of a British newspaper in recent times. As an NFL football player quipped about the signal-stealing scandal involving the New England Patriots, “If you aint cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

No one will ever accuse Stephen Harper of not trying. Time will tell if he’s been trying a little too hard.

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