If you really don’t care what the media write, you don’t use Ottawaspeak. You don’t say your chief of staff has resigned when he’s really been fired — or vice versa. A man who really couldn’t care less what his critics have to say would answer all questions, tell the truth in plain words and damn the torpedoes.

Stephen Harper is not that man. As Paul Wells of Maclean’s has pointed out, our prime minister is a man who puts a lot of effort into making sure no Conservative ever says the wrong thing — never says anything of substance at all, if he can help it. He’s trained himself and his party to never get into trouble.

And that, ironically, is what’s got him into what might be the worst trouble of his career. This weird, pigtail-pulling obsession with the media is partly to blame for the fact that the Senate scandal became a PMO scandal. It’s not that he doesn’t care what we write. It’s that he cares so much, he and his staff default to scenarios and talking points. It’s become an instinct. Almost everything Harper’s government does — from the tough on crime agenda to his attempts to make certain senators just go away — is media strategy. It’s fiction all the way down. If there was ever a political party in Canada deserving of being called the Media Party, it’s the Conservative Party of Canada in 2013.

Of course, that name’s taken. That’s what the Conservatives and their supporters call us, Canadian journalists, to suggest that we’re a biased herd and therefore irrelevant. This, like everything else, is one element in the Conservative story. They have to pretend they don’t care about the media.

Populists need elites to attack, and conservative populists can’t attack the rich and powerful, because some of them are rich and powerful. So we journalists becomes “elites.” And then the Conservatives tie themselves in knots to show us how much they don’t care about us.

They pen reporters at their party convention and yell at them when they walk in the wrong places. They pay, with taxpayers’ money, armies of public servants to monitor what we do, to take our questions and pass them around by email like hot potatoes for a few hours, before disgorging approved “lines” that, ideally, have ludicrously little to do with said questions. They spend an awful lot of time and energy to make sure we — and by extension, Canadians — get as little information as possible. And then they spend more time and energy writing aggrieved letters to the editor.They openly mock the press: John Baird’s director of communications recently tweeted “The constant whining of the media about access isn’t obnoxious at all. Oh wait — it is.” A director of communications should hold “access” as sacred as any journalist. His goal, in theory, is exactly the same as the media’s goal: to make sure news stories are accurate and informed.

(By the way, the public sneering is all a fiction, too. Conservative MPs and their staff are, almost invariably, nice, decent people who get along great with journalists.)