OTTAWA ­— Senior Conservatives and New Democrats are defending Thomas Mulcair’s portrayal of a period in early 2007 when the NDP leader — then poised to leave the provincial Liberals in Quebec — was in private talks with headhunters from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

They challenged the picture painted in a Maclean’s magazine article last week of Mulcair, formerly Quebec’s environment minister, as an unprincipled opportunist who was prepared to join a Conservative government, and even be a candidate despite the much-criticized Tory record on the environment.

The article quoted sources, including a former Harper aide now allied with the Liberals, alleging Mulcair ultimately decided against the move for financial reasons, before agreeing to become the late Jack Layton’s NDP lieutenant in Quebec.

Two Conservatives who had senior government roles at the time said this week that their recollection supports Mulcair’s assertion that talks broke off over his strong disagreement with the Harper government’s environmental policy.

“Money was never the issue,” one source told The Sun via email, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He supported the view of the second source, who told The Sun that Conservatives determined during two sets of talks that Mulcair was “so far out there” on issues like climate change that Harper couldn’t have trusted him to be a team player.

Mulcair, according to NDP and Conservative sources, was interested in becoming president of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a since-disbanded arm’s-length organization that produced critical reports on the government’s environmental record.

But the Conservatives planned at the time to name longtime Conservative insider David McLaughlin to that post.

Instead, the Conservatives wanted Mulcair to serve as a senior adviser to the government, who would not have permission to go public with his strong views on the environment.

One of the two Tory insiders said John Baird, then the environment minister and assigned by Harper to boost the party’s image on the environment, was looking for outside public figures who would give the government credibility on matters like climate change.

“Where (discussions) began to fade was when it was clear that he wasn’t” going to keep his criticisms private, the insider told The Sun. “You can’t work for the government and be holding press conferences or holding interviews against the government, and it was clear he was so far out there on the issues.”

And it became increasingly clear the match wasn’t feasible given that Mulcair had already had a public spat with Jean Charest, then the Liberal premier, over a conservation issue that resulted in Mulcair being removed in 2006 as Quebec’s environment minister.

“His departure from the Charest government was not elegant and he was not a team player. He’s the last type of person Harper would want in his inner sanctum.”

The sources said the Maclean’s piece was based primarily on statements by former Harper media spokesman Dimitri Soudas, now with the Liberals due to his romantic relationship with Tory-turned-Liberal MP Eve Adams.

“This looks like (it’s about) Mulcair’s rise in polls and Liberals getting angry and using this and trying to twist this,” one said.

Soudas told Maclean’s that Mulcair “told me he wanted $300,000 a year and that was his bottom line and, basically, I got back to him, saying I couldn’t go higher that $180,000, and I never heard back from him ever again. Two or three months later, he made the jump to the NDP.”