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The received wisdom is that there is no love lost between Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper.

Yes, they united the right but they came from very different points of the political spectrum. Harper famously kicked a chair when he heard MacKay said the newly united Conservative Party was in jeopardy, over the prospect of changing the way future leaders were picked, at the Montreal convention in 2005.

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Further strains emerged when MacKay’s mentor, Brian Mulroney, was ostracized by the party; the relationship was said to have reached breaking point over the then-defence minister’s use of a search-and-rescue helicopter for a personal flight in 2010 (the freshly unsealed Mike Duffy diaries suggest MacKay believes Harper’s communications aide Dimitri Soudas leaked news of the flight to the media, after first ordering him to take it).

Yet this narrative fails to capture the strong bond between the two men who made it possible for the Conservative Party to dominate Canadian politics for the past decade. People who have worked at the highest level of government say there is no minister closer to the Harper family than MacKay. “I’d certainly describe him as one of the PM’s most trusted sources of political advice,” said Ian Brodie, Harper’s first chief of staff. “The PM has a lot of sources for policy advice, but not so many places to get advice on political strategy, positioning.”