Michael Den Tandt: Robocalls face-off in Question Period today

Stephen Harper has three possible options in Question Period this afternoon, it seems to me, as he faces down opposition parties champing at the bit to attack him over the robocalls scandal, which broke last week while the House was in recess.

First, he can launch a frontal attack. In this case he deflects, re-directs and declines to answer all opposition questions, instead launching counter-accusations of his own. “The Liberal Party has nothing to teach us about electoral ethics,” he might say, for example, before launching into an extended riff on the sponsorship scandal. The tacit message: Liberals are corrupt and their corruption was a lot worse than ours. So they should back off while we sort it out amongst ourselves.

Second, Harper can go “wire-brush.” (In 2005, at the height of the Liberal sponsorship scandal, Paul Martin communications director Scott Reid vowed that Martin would be the “wire brush” that scraped the Liberal Party clean). In this eventuality Harper presents himself as outraged about the allegations of fraudulent calls. He disavows all knowledge and vows that the guilty will be rooted out and brought to justice.

Third—and this is by far the most likely scenario—he combines strategies one and two, slamming the Grits for hypocrisy and venality while at the same time offering himself up as the avenging angel who will right whatever wrongs were committed by members of his own party, if indeed wrongs were committed. While he’s at it, he launches a few drive-bys at the NDP for being incompetent managers, so what business do they have accusing him of anything?

Pollster Nik Nanos, according to a report this morning, believes robocalls will blow away if nothing links the scandal to Harper directly and personally. Nanos could be right.

My instinct though, says he’s wrong. There is such a thing as a tipping point – an incident or incidents that have a cascading effect. To me, this feels like that. And there’s this: There’s so much yet to learn in this, which virtually guarantees more headlines, for weeks, into budget time.

Based on his track record, I think Harper will be tempted to do something dramatic and quick, to lance the boil. Calling an independent inquiry—not on the scale of an O’Connor or a Gomery perhaps, but an investigation by a trusted retired judge, reporting to Parliament and findings to be made public—will be the fallback, if this continues to grow.