OTTAWA—Until someone in Stephen Harper’s office found a hidden stash of maturity Wednesday afternoon, Dave Ellis was going to be prevented from doing his job.

Ellis is a CTV photo journalist with 28 years’ experience.

His crime? He asked the prime minister a question in New York last week.

He was asking a question on a breaking news story for the benefit of his viewers.

For that grave offence, Harper’s office was prepared to prevent him from boarding the prime minister’s plane Thursday morning bound for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Ellis was to provide the television pictures to all Canadian networks during Harper’s week-long trip, which includes an APEC summit.

In the face of opposition from the press gallery Wednesday, the PMO backed down and Ellis will be allowed to do his job, said Harper’s communications director, Jason MacDonald.

“I’m not going to get into the issue . . . all that matters is he will be on the trip,’’ he said.

Battles between media and the prime minister should, as a rule, be left in-house because readers are not particularly interested in our problems doing our jobs.

But even by Harper’s standards, this was an outrageous attempt to control the manner in which the Ottawa media report on a man who is heading toward eight years in office.

Last week, while in New York, Harper had a highly scripted public program, including a business roundtable. He took questions from the Canadian American Business Council, but not Canadian journalists.

Before his meeting, Harper had a “photo op” with the business leaders, a staged event in which the prime minister smiles and grabs the hand of whomever he is about to meet.

It’s simply to make the prime minister look good.

Except in this case, news had just broken in Ottawa that Peterborough Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro, the prime minister’s former parliamentary secretary and a man Harper had defended, was being charged under the Canada Elections Act.

Ellis checked with his Ottawa office, which gave him the green light to ask Harper about it, and he did, respectfully and politely seeking a reaction from the prime minister.

For having the temerity to ask a question when Harper sought silence, calls went to the upper echelon of the network. Ellis was not being chastised, he was not being banned from future photo ops. He was going to be booted off the prime minister’s plane.

There is, in fact, an unwritten, unspoken rule, arcane as it sounds, that questions are not to be shouted at the prime minister during photo ops.

But those rules are not always followed, particularly in the case of breaking news, and MacDonald agrees that the rules could be worked out before each event.

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Harper had the option of ignoring an ethics question, which he did. Had Ellis asked him something that the prime minister believed could score him some partisan political points, the prime minister could have answered.

This is, after all, a prime minister who called Canadian journalists together following Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in London, so he could take a partisan swipe at Justin Trudeau.

So the rules seem to ebb and flow in Harper’s world. The rules are based on whether he wants to answer.

“Asking a question of an elected official shouldn’t be a punishable offence,” Daniel Thibeault, president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery, told the Star’s Bruce Campion-Smith.

In this case, a newly rebuilt Prime Minister’s Office, featuring Ray Novak as chief of staff (replacing Nigel Wright who resigned in the Mike Duffy affair), his deputy, the highly partisan and media-averse chair of the 2011 campaign Jenni Byrne, and MacDonald barely into his job as communications director, appeared to be sending a muscular signal to the press gallery as it seeks to gain control of the message heading into the second half of the Harper mandate.

They reached too far.

This goes beyond a penchant in this government for communications directors responding to phone messages with emailed answers that are merely talking points.

This goes beyond Harper’s obvious disdain for the Ottawa media, something he shows by approaching every brief encounter like he is approaching a root canal.

No, this move, picking and choosing who you want on your plane covering an official government foreign visit is one step short of the PMO flying to Malaysia with its own stenographer who would email back tales of the glorious leader’s conquests.

No one is asking Harper and his team to like the people assigned to cover him. But the press pack served notice that if the office won’t respect them, they’ll bite back.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1

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