It was an illuminating moment in a remarkably candid conversation.

Brian Mulroney, the most successful Conservative prime minister since Sir John A. Macdonald, was sitting down for a rare television interview the other day in Montreal.

TVOntario’s Steve Paikin, always adroit at coaxing politicians to dish, broached the subject of the May 2 election and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper.

“You’re voting for Mr. Harper, I take it,” said Paikin, coincidentally the moderator of Tuesday’s English-language leaders’ debate.

“At this point,” replied Mulroney with a pause that seemed to hang in the air longer than its mere second, “I’ll vote for the Conservative candidate in my constituency.”

Although the architect of decisive Progressive Conservative victories in 1984 and 1988 conceded that Harper is “clearly a competent Prime Minister,” his unease with the current Tory leader was barely concealed.

He praised Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff (“an intelligent man, hard-working guy”), NDP Leader Jack Layton (“an outstanding leader of his party”), and even Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe (“respected in Quebec”), whose party began in 1990 as a separatist offshoot of Mulroney’s Tories.

He suggested Ignatieff could win despite polls indicating otherwise: “You never can tell what happens in political life. I’ll tell you this, in 1984, when the campaign started I was 14 points behind. We ended up in a rather different fashion.”

He touted former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, who endured similar political uncertainty to Harper, but had far more to show for his tenure, including medicare and the Maple Leaf flag: “You can do big things — even if you have a minority Parliament. Witness what happened with Mr. Pearson, who achieved great things with minority status.”

And he pointedly dismissed a central tenet of the Conservative campaign, the spectre of an Ignatieff-Layton-Duceppe government: “They should not speculate in any way about coalitions or all of this nonsense.”

Certainly, Mulroney is still smarting from fallout of his ill-advised business dealings with German lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, now in prison serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion.

Confidants say he feels like he was “thrown under a bus” over the Schreiber affair by people he trusted in the highest levels of the Harper government and such wounds are unlikely to easily heal.

“You have to understand, nothing matters more to him than loyalty,” said an associate. “And he feels he was betrayed by some people who wouldn’t be where they are if it weren’t for him.”

Yet, several Tories insist, there is more at play here than just personal slights.

Mulroney — like others from disparate wings of the Conservative Party of Canada, be they former Reformers or Progressive Conservatives — appears disappointed by Harper’s paucity of ambition.

Reform Party founder Preston Manning famously urged Canadian conservatives to “think big,” but his one-time underling has for the most part governed cautiously, using the constraints of a minority Parliament as an excuse for the lack of any major initiative.

“Being in power is better than not being in power,” explained one Tory MP, who like others interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss such machinations.

The MP noted Harper spent years in opposition as a Reform MP, Canadian Alliance leader, and, finally, Conservative leader, so survival in government trumps any sweeping policy dream he may once have espoused.

“It’s as simple as that,” the Tory member said, emphasizing that Harper’s greatest legacy was “uniting the right” to create a viable and enduring alternative to the Liberals.

Still, after a middling half-decade in power, some Tories wonder what else the history books will say about Harper.

“What, really, have we got to show for our five years in office?” asked a former senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office.

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“An accountability act that forces us to hire kids,” the insider said with a scoff, referring to the legislation designed to curb lobbying that has made it difficult for the Tories to attract talent to government.

Even the few accomplishments that actually touch Canadians’ day-to-day lives are questioned.

Sources say Mulroney, who created the goods and services tax two decades ago, has privately expressed concerned about Harper’s reducing the GST rate from 7 per cent to 5 per cent. (It has since been melded with the 8 per cent provincial sales tax into a 13 per cent harmonized sales tax.)

“He should have lowered income taxes instead. Conservatives believe in taxing consumption, not output. How does a GST cut increase productivity?” fumed a veteran Tory.

A Mulroney-ite attacking Harper’s conservative bona fides?

It gets worse.

With the retirement from electoral politics of Reform and Canadian Alliance icons Chuck Strahl, Jay Hill, and Stockwell Day, it’s apparently not just the Conservatives’ centrist Mulroney wing that feels ornery.

There was Alberta conservative stalwart Link Byfield on the front page of the National Post last Tuesday, complaining that Harper has “systematically suppressed debate” on matters such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

“Harper has made it abundantly and compellingly clear that the social conservative agenda is not to be contemplated in his government and not to be advocated or advanced. And he will have come to this conclusion because he has seen it necessary to get centre voters. As long as he’s leader that will remain the case,” Byfield told journalist Charles Lewis.

Such fractiousness can, of course, be viewed as growing pains in a maturing political party.

But something Mulroney told Paikin lingers longer than the one-second dramatic pause over his voting intentions.

“There are big ideas out there,” said the man who helped end apartheid in South Africa and gave Canada free trade with the United States.

“Popularity is meaningless unless you use it to do big and good things for your country and for the people of Canada.”

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