Ottawa — The prime minister may snub the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery dinner this fall, a move he's considering in order to register his displeasure with an ongoing disagreement his office has with Parliament Hill journalists over the way his press conferences ought to be conducted.

CTV News has learned that Stephen Harper plans to tell his caucus at a future meeting that he will not attend the dinner, to be held Nov. 25 at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que.

He will not insist that other caucus members boycott the Press Gallery dinner but many Conservative MPs and nearly all cabinet ministers are expected not to attend the dinner to show solidarity with their boss.

A senior official with the Prime Minister's Office would not confirm that Harper will snub the press gallery, saying only that "his schedule is not set that far out."

Pierre Trudeau is believed to be the last prime minister to snub the gallery dinner. Trudeau was unhappy at the time about press reports describing his marriage to Margaret Trudeau.

The press gallery dinner is a social occasion to which the prime minister and all party leaders are invited. The leaders usually give a speech in which they poke fun at themselves, their political opponents and the political process.

So long as he has been a party leader, Harper has always attended the dinner and, indeed, did so last year.

The spat between the press gallery and the PMO has boiled down, essentially, to a fight over who gets to decide who will ask the questions when the Prime Minister holds a press conference.

The PMO communications staff prefers to canvas reporters ahead of the press conference, note the names of the reporters who wish to ask a question and then, once the prime minister arrives, a PMO official calls out a reporter's name based on the list.

There have not yet been any accusations that some reporter or organization is being prevented from asking questions because the PMO is unhappy with a particular report.

That said, the concern that this could happen is reason enough, the Parliamentary Press Gallery believes, that a representative of the PMO ought not to be the one deciding who gets to ask the questions.

The Press Gallery believes one of its representatives ought to moderate the Prime Minister's press conferences and choose who gets to ask the questions.

During the last election campaign, then-prime minister Paul Martin's communications staff kept a list of reporters who wanted to ask questions and then they would call out a reporter from that list -- just like the current prime minister is doing.

But it quickly became apparent that Martin's communications staff was not happy with coverage some news organizations were giving his campaign and, as a result, reporters from those organizations were rarely or never, in one case, called upon to ask a question of the Liberal candidate.