Rest assured, the Canadian news media isn’t nearly powerful enough for anything like the News International scandal to happen here.

But if a phone-hacking scandal is unlikely in Canada, it’s not because politicians and journalists here are inherently more ethical. It’s more a reflection of the fact that Canadian politicians simply don’t need the news media in the same way they do in Britain. “Canadian newspapers are such a niche market — so few people actually read most of them — that they just don’t have the impact in Canada that News of the World did in the U.K.,” Harper’s former chief of staff Ian Brodie, told The Canadian Press in an email.