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There’s no security this year. No sniffer dogs checking out the media. No burly RCMP flanking the main stage to tackle knife-wielding assailants. Just a kid in a yellow rain slicker making sure nobody steals anything.

“Doesn’t he look relaxed?” said interim leader Rona Ambrose in her speech to the gathering, gesturing to a Stephen Harper who indeed does look more relaxed— at least as relaxed as Harper can look in a crowd.

“There’s no one quite as carefree as a former leader,” said Ambrose.

In this very place, a younger and more energetic Harper had once helped to knit together the modern Canadian conservative movement from fractured factions.

Now, having officially joined the old timer benches, he presided over a tent once again packed with fighting conservatives.

Playing out between the stacked piles of decorative hay bales, of course, is the ongoing race for Conservative leader. That’s arguably the reason Michael Chong flew out here, bought a $10 cowboy hat and is now clunking around in new boots that are almost certainly chewing his feet to shreds.

“And Michael Chong, the MP for … uh, Ontario,” said the announcer, after initially missing the Wellington-Halton Hills MP in his read-through of the elected officials present.

Fellow leadership contender Maxime Bernier is also working the room, becoming that rare specimen of a Quebecer being fawned over by Conservative Albertans. “It’s my second home. I’ve been called the Albertan from Quebec,” he tells one group before launching into war stories about staring down the dairy lobby.