By Frances Russell | June 12, 2013 The Harper Conservatives could be on the verge of an implosion/explosion. There are so many variants of Canada's conservative/Conservative party it's dizzying - social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, religious conservatives, prairie protest conservatives, American populist conservatives, law and order conservatives, Big Business conservatives, Small Business conservatives, Mulroney conservatives, U.S. Republican Mike Harris conservatives and -- in vastly diminished in numbers - Maritime and Ontario Red Tories. Riding herd on this restive mass of contradictory if not openly hostile factions is the Stephen Harper government. Its strain of conservatism contains elements of all the others but stands alone due to one unique feature: a total disregard for democratic norms. When rules like those tiresome and inefficient precedents of 1,000 years of British parliamentary democracy get in the way, the Harperites simply mow them down and write their own. This sense of divine right arises from the Harperites' belief in their innate superiority. Examples of their rogue behaviour are legion. The biggest and perhaps most disturbing is the Conservatives' perpetual guerilla war with Elections Canada and Canada's election laws. It started right at the beginning. The 2006 election's infamous in-and-out scheme enabled the Conservatives to shuffle $1.3 million in advertising costs into and out of the accounts of 67 candidates - evading the party's spending limits. The five-year legal battle with Elections Canada ended with the Conservatives paying $52,000 in fines. But it cost taxpayers $2.3 million. Last month, a federal judge found there was evidence of electoral fraud within a suspected nation-wide robocall voter suppression scheme in the 2011 election. Last week, Elections Canada -- employing a section of Canada's election law -- ordered that Manitoba MPs Shelley Glover and James Bezan suspended from Parliament because they overspent their campaign limit by refusing to declare the full cost of their permanent billboards and signs. The government simply ignored the ordered suspension. Until Glover and Bezan get their day in court, probably months from now, they continue to sit and vote on the nation's business -- in clear violation of the law. Then there's the disdain for Parliament itself. After obtaining their long-sought majority in 2011 and freed from the chains of minority, the Conservatives eagerly began flouting Canadian parliamentary laws and precedents. In defiance of British and Canadian parliamentary history, committees are routinely shuttered from the public. Tradition in the English-speaking democracies holds that committees only go in camera to protect witnesses and sensitive matters of state. Now, MPs are gagged at the government's whim and prevented from publicly disclosing (embarrassing?) matters and issues under debate. Last year, the Conservatives jammed the government's entire fiscal plan into two four hundred-page-plus omnibus budget bills that repealed or amended 74 acts, including many laws protecting labour, the environment and social programs, and used closure to push them through parliament in twin marathon 24-hour sessions. On top of all this authoritarian, behaviour comes the Conservatives' ongoing attempts to cripple ideological "enemies" such as unions, academics, scientists, civil servants and other political and philosophical "undesirables" through gag orders and U.S.-style right-to-work laws. Finally, and most shocking of all, is the Harperites' decision to turn Canada's six foundational environmental laws over to the multinational oil lobby to rewrite -- and gut - at will in those same two railroaded omnibus budget bills. "Within 10 months...the industry had almost everything it wanted," the CBC reported. Many Canadians will recall Treasury Board President Tony Clement's memorable decision in 2010 to simply help himself to a $10 million fund meant to increase border security to spruce up his home riding some several hundred kilometers north of the border. This is the same Tony Clement who shut down the mandatory long form census against the objections of just about everybody - provinces, cities, municipalities, school boards, hospital boards and social policy experts - involved in making Canada work well for its citizens. Now Clement has given himself the unfettered power to run the federal public service like a boot camp. On May 30, the Ottawa Sun's Tony Spears reported that Clement had vowed to axe unsatisfactory employees within 18 months of a problem being identified. Said Clement: "Today we choose to start shedding baggage that has weighed us down like a snowsuit in summer." A government with such authoritarian impulses hardly fits its self-styled image as the champion of the Tim Horton's-frequenting, hockey-crazed, little guy. The increasingly shaky conservative/Conservative artifice could be on the verge of crashing down. The decision of right-wing populist Alberta Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber to leave the government caucus and sit as an independent could be the first hole in the dike the multiple and mutually antithetical conservative tribes may finally burst wide open. Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who betrayed a 2003 Progressive Conservative leadership convention pledge to David Orchard not to sell out to Preston Manning's Alberta-based Christian revivalist Reform Party, has mused publicly that he could follow Rathgeber out the door should the party attempt to crush the already-diminished weight of Maritime and Central Canadian Progressive Conservatives by adopting a one person-one vote rule for the party leadership, swamping Canadian Red Toryism for good. Stay tuned. The Harper government is a House of Cards; a scheming, nasty, angry --and now highly-threatened -- autocracy trying to herd cats.   Frances Russell was born in Winnipeg and graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science. A journalist since 1962, she has covered and commented on politics in Manitoba, Ontario, B.C. and Ottawa, working for The Winnipeg Tribune, United Press International, The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun and The Winnipeg Free Press as well as freelanced for The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, CBC Radio and TV and Time Magazine. She is the author of two award-winning books on Manitoba history: Mistehay Sakahegan - The Great Lake: The Beauty and the Treachery of Lake Winnipeg and The Canadian Crucible - Manitoba's Role in Canada's Great Divide. Both won the Manitoba Historical Society Award for popular history. She is married with one son and two grandsons and lives in Winnipeg.