More from Lawrence Martin available More fromavailable here

Those callous comparisons are back again. Reports that the Conservative government compiled an enemies’ list for newly appointed cabinet ministers are triggering more talk that this government operates in a way reminiscent of the Richard Nixon Republicans.

I sometimes get questions about how Harperland stacks up to Nixonland. People cite the secrecy, the abuse of power, the bludgeoning of opponents, the attempts to subvert the democratic system and much more.

The term “enemies’ list” certainly has a Nixonian ring. It is toxic vocabulary. I’m not sure what was done in this recent instance by the Harper team is as serious as it sounds. Other governments, we can bet, have compiled lists of adversaries, real or imagined. What is noteworthy in terms of the Harper Conservatives though is that such types of underhanded activities are part of a consistent pattern that dates back to when they came to power in 2006.

These days their dirty work is capturing more public attention because of the glut of revelations. We’ve learned of the Senate expenses scandal wherein a secret pay-out came from the prime minister’s chief of staff to get a senator out of trouble. We’ve learned of dirty tricks such as Conservatives’ use of their paid party interns to disrupt a Justin Trudeau rally. We’ve learned of the Harper gang’s use of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to advertise a jobs program that doesn’t even exist. We’ve heard of petty and classless behaviour such as their plotting to prevent Liberal Marc Garneau, Canada’s first astronaut, from appearing at the unveiling of a Canadarm display.

In addition, we’ve heard a Federal Court ruling that said the Conservatives’ data bank was used as the source of a widespread vote suppression campaign aimed at sending voters to the wrong polling stations in the last federal election. The robocalls scandal, as it is called, brought Donald Segretti, one of the perpetrators of Nixon’s dirty tricks, out of the woodwork. He gallingly argued it was worse than many of the abuses his crowd were involved in. “We never tried,” said Segretti, “to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote.”

In the court case brought by the Council of Canadians, the judge could not find proof of who was responsible. But one Conservative operative, Michael Sona, faces a charge in relation to robocalls. Another, Jenni Byrne, director of the party’s political operations, has been fingered by Tory MP Tom Lukiwski as being behind a deceptive call campaign in Saskatchewan.

Harperland is not in a league with Nixonland, certainly not on the basis of what we know now. But that doesn’t mean that the abuse of power by this government is not of an extraordinary nature.

While the documented evidence of abuse of power by this government is plentiful, we shouldn’t get carried away with comparisons to Nixon and the Watergate era. We’ve had no evidence of Conservatives breaking into Liberal Party headquarters, or of them wiretapping adversaries, or using police agencies and tax authorities against them. There is no evidence of a dirty tricks unit that compares to Nixon’s “plumbers”. There are no charges of obstruction of justice against top people. No multitude of Harper operatives have been sent off to the slammer, as was the case with Nixon’s men.

Harperland is not in a league with Nixonland, certainly not on the basis of what we know now. But that doesn’t mean that the abuse of power by this government is not of an extraordinary nature. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t shadings of character and behaviour that are similar to Nixon’s.

There’s been a siege mentality at work here that calls to mind those times. We have a leader who seems incapable of escaping his brooding resentments and authoritarian urges. Many observers talk of a paranoia strain in the Harper team which has led to a reliance on the dark arts, a reliance which, in terms of volume, goes beyond anything we have seen in Ottawa as far as memory reaches.

Where do the comparisons to a Nixon-type morality come from?

Not helping the Conservative case was their leader becoming the first prime minister to be found in contempt of parliament. It was for refusing to share basic information on program costing with parliament’s democratically-elected representatives.

Not helping was the prime minister’s instituting of an unprecedented vetting and censorship system wherein all information is controlled from the centre. Resultant muzzling stories are extraordinary. The science community is so distrusted that Harper operatives, in part of what commentator Allan Gregg sees as an Orwellian obsession, shadows distinguished scientists with chaperones – media minders as they’re called – to see they don’t step out of line.

Not helping have been many other developments. Campaigns to discredit opponents were a staple of the Nixon years and have been, though not to the same degree, of the Harper years. Targets include, to name just a few, diplomat Richard Colvin, Veterans’ affairs advocate Sean Bruyea, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, and budget officer Kevin Page. Between elections, the Harper team has brought in character-assassination advertising, much of it dishonest or out of context, to a degree far beyond what our politics has seen before.

Nixon used the machinery of state in an attempt to throttle or subvert the democratic process. Among the anti-democratic actions of the Harper government have been the record or near-record use of closure and time limitation tactics to cut of parliamentary debate, the shutting down or prorogation of parliament for crass political purposes, the politicization of the bureaucracy to the point where civil servants were once used as stooges in a fake citizenship renewal ceremony. Additionally there’s been the undermining of oversight bodies and abuse of process as seen in the use of an all-consuming omnibus bill.

Nefarious activities have included the funneling at the time of the G-8 summit of $40-million meant for border infrastructure into what was viewed as a political slush fund. They have included the money shuffling in the “in and out” affair, and several instances of document tampering. In the 2011 election that featured the alleged robocalls, a senior Tory operative leaked fake material in an attempt to tar Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff as an Iraq war planner. Citizens were thrown out of Harper rallies for having the slightest background ties to other parties.

Not unlike that found in the Nixon White House is the anti-intellectual strain of this government. We’ve seen the suppression of research and empirical data, the campaign against Statistics Canada and science and more.

Any enemies’ list this government may have concocted is likely not as long as Richard Nixon’s, but the extreme partisanship, as has been documented in dozens of media reports, has created an atmosphere of confrontation and polarization rarely seen.

The prime minister and his men have been caught out in their excesses many times. But as witnessed in the recent rash of abuses, being caught has had no mitigating impact. It’s like there is something pathological at work here. It’s like the degree of venom, or what former Harper cabinet minister David Emerson called “hatred”, for their opponents of the lead players is such that they can’t help themselves. It is such that even Conservative caucus members have recently started to rebel against the degree of dictate from above.

Harperland isn’t Nixonland. But there are shadings, ominous ones, which correspond and which have put the prime minister and his team in a precarious place.

Lawrence Martin is the author of 10 books, including six national bestsellers. His most recent, Harperland, was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen award. His other works include two volumes on Jean Chrétien, two on Canada-U.S. relations and three books on hockey.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.