MONTREAL—Make no mistake about the RCMP torpedo that has hit Stephen Harper’s ship of state this week. It has thrown the prime minister into uncharted waters with barely more than a plank to hold on to and keep his head out of water.

Not only did Conservative strategists not see the hit coming until it was almost upon them, but they had cause to hope that the RCMP would eventually throw the prime minister a lifeline instead of leaving him to sink or swim in the debris of his own Senate scandal narrative.

Based on past experience, the expectation that the RCMP stood to bring some form of closure to the Senate scandal — by possibly fingering one or more errant senators but also allowing the rest of the government to move on — was not totally unreasonable.

Harper is hardly the first prime minister to have had the RCMP look into a political controversy but he is the first to have had such an investigation blow up so spectacularly in his face.

When faced with an ethics-related fire that stonewalling alone could not contain, calling in the police was usually Jean Chrétien’s default course. Time and again the net effect was to suck oxygen out of the blaze.

It is no secret that in Paul Martin’s place, Chrétien would have handed the damning auditor-general’s findings about the sponsorship program to the RCMP rather than go down the rocky path of the Gomery commission.

The bar that the RCMP has to reach before it has sufficient evidence to allege that an actual crime has been committed is much higher than that which must be met by a parliamentary watchdog like the auditor-general or a public inquiry in search of administrative or ethical wrongdoing.

But Chrétien was fortunate not to have operated in as wired a working environment. Today the large grey zone of political ethics is no longer as off limits to the police in their hunt for black-or-white evidence as it used to be.

As the events of this week have demonstrated, emails are becoming to political scandals what DNA evidence is to crime scenes.

In this instance emails have provided the underpinning for both the criminal case the RCMP is trying to build against former chief of staff Nigel Wright and suspended Senator Mike Duffy and the opposition’s accusations of a conspiracy involving a string of high-profile players in Harper’s chain of command.

Troubling discrepancies between how far out of the loop Harper claims to have been and apparent efforts to keep him in that very loop have come to light.

A large gap between the testimony of senior Conservative operatives as to their involvement in this affair and the actual level of their participation in the scheme has been exposed.

In the still recent old days, the back-and-forth between the PMO, the Senate, the party and Harper himself over the weeks and months of the Duffy affair would have been conducted on the phone or in person, leaving little or no concrete trail for the RCMP to pursue.

If its investigators had had to take the main protagonists in the Senate scandal at their word, the RCMP might have closed the file in whole or in part this week rather than cast a wider net.

Harper is not a target of that net. The RCMP has stated that he is personally off the hook. But those who are — to varying degrees — caught in the scandal’s mesh are not all former Conservative associates. Many still hold senior positions in the party and the government. Given that, one can only wonder how the prime minister will sustain his mantra that he has cut the culprits loose.

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But one way or another the episode stands to change the way governments conduct their backroom business — forcing their operatives to either seek even more clandestine means to manage crisis or to stick to arrangements that can withstand the light of day. It would be nice but probably overly optimistic to hope that they opt for the latter.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday

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