MONTREAL—By the time Mike Duffy’s trial wraps up later this year, voters will already have rendered their election verdict on Stephen Harper. But regardless of whether the disgraced senator turns out to be guilty in the eye of the law, in the court of public opinion the tenuous case designed to insulate the Conservative leader from a scandal involving his closest aides has already been blown out of the water.

From the outset, accepting Harper’s contention that he was unaware of the extraordinary decision of then-PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright to secretly reimburse Duffy’s unallowable expenses involved a significant leap of faith.

And yet, until the latest court developments, more than a few parliamentary insiders — including veteran political journalists such as myself and, more importantly, CTV bureau chief Robert Fife who broke the story — were willing to at least entertain the notion that Harper’s version of events could be true.

For one, despite the talk of an all-knowing omnipotent Prime Minister’s Office, files have been known to fall through the cracks.

The fact that the PMO has its finger in virtually every government pie actually tends to make such occurrences more frequent.

An octopus does not have eyes to match its many tentacles.

As the PMO was dealing with Duffy, Wright and Harper had many other irons in the fire, including a major trade agreement with the European Union and the planning of a mid-mandate cabinet shuffle.

And then, it was initially suggested that the loop within which Wright had operated was so small that the stratagem could have been engineered without Harper getting wind of it.

That thesis fell apart when hundreds of email exchanges between Wright, various PMO staffers and the Conservative leadership in the Senate were brought to light by the RCMP investigation.

As of that point, only a bit of chicken wire still held Harper’s story together and it centred on the notion that Ray Novak, the aide most likely to have his back, was not in on the Duffy fix.

In the words of campaign spokesperson Kory Teneycke, it would have been “unfathomable” in light of the close relationship between the two that Novak would not have shared the information with Harper.

Teneycke made that categorical statement just before the Duffy trial heard compelling testimony that pointed to Novak being in the loop of Wright’s initiative.

As a result, the last thread of Harper’s version is now so frayed that it speaks to his lack of an alternative explanation that he is still hanging on to it for dear life.

For to continue to accept that version is also to accept two dubious propositions.

One: that Novak — Harper’s handpicked replacement for Wright — never read one of the most politically sensitive admissions a PMO chief of staff has ever put in an email or, alternatively, that he did not hear about it from those who read their mail.

Two: that his reported attendance at a meeting where the Duffy operation was discussed is a figment of the imagination of Ben Perrin, the former legal counsel to the PMO who testified to it under oath.

It has been argued that the reimbursement of Duffy’s expenses and the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring that attended it barely qualify as a scandal.

On the scale of the fabricated evidence pertaining to the existence of weapons of mass destructions in Iraq offered as a rationale for the 2003 US-led offensive on that country, the Duffy affair would not necessarily register.

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But that still leaves voters with two questions to ponder between now and the Oct. 19 election.

If Harper’s most trusted aides — many of whom are still in place — were willing to use every lever at their disposal to lie their way out of an embarrassment to the Conservative party, how far would they go to sway public opinion on a matter of central importance to the government and the country?

And if voters — upon being presented with undeniable evidence of a high-level cover-up designed to mislead them — are content to look the other way, how can they expect future governments to think twice about the risks of fooling Canadians into believing whatever best serves their partisan purpose?

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