The competition to replace Stephen Harper as head of the Conservative Party of Canada has been going on for months, and it still has exactly two months to go.
Maxime Bernier, one of the 14 candidates for the job, was a long way from home this past weekend.
He made it all the way to Prince George from his home base in the Beauce riding south of Quebec City.
By trade, he is a lawyer with special interest in banking and economics. He even wrote a book on tax reform and has been the MP for his area through the past decade. His electoral margins have been large, even when the Bloc Quebecois was strong in the province.
His father was also the region's MP.
Once he was in government, Bernier was appointed by Harper to key cabinet positions including Minister of Industry, Minister of Small Business & Tourism, and Minister of Foreign Affairs.
His experience in government is what directed him to lead a roadshow-style leadership campaign, instead of trying to get social media and paid advertising to do the work. He is crisscrossing the nation to meet directly with Conservative party members and, should he win the position, those contacts will then also be fresh for the purposes of the next federal election.
"I'm an authentic politician. What I'm saying now, I've said for the last 10 years. It's a real platform. It's not a slogan. It's not a buzz word. It's real public policy," he told The Citizen in an exclusive interview Sunday afternoon over a steaming cup of strong herbal tea.
He knows one of the main challenges he faces is the tide of disdain Canadians expressed in the last election for fundamentalist ramrod policies wielded by the Harper team and amplified by Donald Trump's agenda in the United States. Even some of the 14 competitors in the leadership race are using that language. He refuses to apologize for being a right-wing politician but he also stomps his feet about using the conservative brand to promote racism and other forms of prejudice.
Being a conservative government, in his view, is about accountability to the voter, especially in matters of public money, and making decisions based on hard numbers, no matter how uncomfortable that might feel even to himself.
His main example, he said, was his No. 1 plank in his personal platform. It has cost him popularity in his home riding where there are more dairy farmers than any other federal riding in Canada and it has cost him the outward support of other MPs in his party who have similar demographics, but he refuses to support the agriculture commodity boards that still dot the landscape.
There are marketing coalitions for maple syrup, dairy, eggs and other agricultural products.
"I want to abolish the cartel of supply management. I believe in free markets," he said. "You can't say to Canadians (as a free enterprise government), you know, the free market system is good but you must have a socialist system for the dairy produce, the egg products..."
"There are 19,000 Canadians working under supply management. I say it's a cartel. They are fixing production and fixing the price," Bernier said.
The second most prominent plank for his platform is ending what he calls corporate welfare.
"Grants and subsidies to businesses, like the federal government gave last month,
$375 million to Bombardier. I won't do that," he said.
When reminded that his own government handed millions in loans to the automotive manufacturing sector during the credit crisis of 2008-09, he shook his head with disdain at the memory.
"I won't do that. If you can't get a loan on the capital market, why the taxpayer should have to take the risk? Big grants and loans and subsidies to business - I want to abolish that. Because I want our economy to be more effective."
That kind of tough love comes with a responsibility, he said. If you're going to reduce the social safety net for businesses, you have to give business a strong foundation. That, he said, means competitive taxation from the major corporations down to small business and to the workers who bring the products to actuality. He would outright eliminate the capital gains tax, for example, to entice companies to locate in Canada when the United States was showing signs of slashing taxes there to woo the same businesses.
"I don't want to do like Justin Trudeau - borrowing money to stimulate the economy. It is not working," Bernier said.
"The big deficit and huge debt to stimulate the economy - we have to do the opposite. We have to balance the budget, but also lower taxes for entrepreneurs and everyday Canadians. That will be the way. The private sector will create wealth and jobs in this country."
His third major plank is a plan to address the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
While one of his competitors is blasting online ads about cyberspace urging the abolition of the CBC, Bernier takes the opposing view. While wants to see the amount of money paid by the taxpayer to the CBC to go down by hundreds of millions of dollars, (although he favours crowd-sourcing CBC funds to supplement their income the way PBS does in the U.S.), he also wants to see the company actually revitalized and made stronger than ever in some key areas. Discontinue investing in the making of television shows the private sector should be making, he said, and focus instead on non-commercial programming.
"I don't want to privatize the CBC, we need a CBC, but only focused on its mandate: Canadian culture, speaking about what's happening in our country. More journalists in northern Ontario and northern B.C., more correspondents in Paris, London, things the private sector is not doing."
In about three weeks time, he said, he's going to announce another key element to his leadership bid. He has been conducting exhaustive research on how Canada can rewrite its relationship with the First Nations of the same land-base.
He's critical of the Indian Act, and the way treaties were not being lived up to, nor aboriginal nations outside of a treaty were being treated. He hinted at "accountability and property rights on reserves" which sounded both promising but also familiar to the divisive stances taken by the Harper government that spawned the outrage of the Idle No More movement. Furthermore, Bernier said his research consultation was being done by the Fraser Institute and the Frontier Centre For Public Policy, not the Assembly of First Nations or the National Centre For First Nations Governance.
He has every intention of consulting with aboriginal Canada, after he first gets the foundational economic research done, he said.
The two right-wing think tanks were just helping him with that research.
He also hinted that in his view, leaders should be moving all the time among the people they represent. Prince George was a city circled on his personal agenda for more of that personal interaction.
He is, so far, the only one of the 14 Conservative leadership candidates to stop in for a personal visit.
