OTTAWA—Conservative MPs have been quietly approaching Justin Trudeau to tell him they’re refusing to take part in their party’s planned mass-mail attack against the new Liberal leader.

“Already a number of Conservatives have mentioned to me privately that they’re not particularly appreciative of it and they don’t intend to use them,” Trudeau told reporters on Wednesday.

Some have been saying so publicly as well, such as Eastern Ontario Conservative MP Daryl Kramp, who told a local radio station in his Prince Edward—Hastings riding: “The day it becomes personal that’s the day I’m not involved with that.”

As well, The Canadian Press has been tracking Conservative MPs who are dissenters on the ads and at least eight have registered disapproval so far. And there could be more. “I haven’t heard from anyone who’s going to (use the ads,)” Alberta MP Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot) told CP.

Conservative MPs received a kit last week instructing them how to use taxpayer-financed mail privileges to send anti-Trudeau mail to Canadian households.

Trudeau didn’t name the Conservatives who have talked to him about their distaste for the kits, but one Conservative who has definitely not spoken to Trudeau is Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Though there is an unwritten tradition of prime ministers phoning new party leaders to convey private congratulations, Harper has not done so with the man who became Liberal leader on April 14. Beyond brief words of congratulation in the House the next day, Harper eschewed the protocol that usually is extended from prime ministers to their newest rivals across the floor of the Commons, and vice-versa.

The prime minister’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, confirms the two have not spoken privately yet. In the Commons on Wednesday, Harper said he had been listening to the new Liberal leader and had heard “nothing of substance whatsoever” so far.

Harper did phone Thomas Mulcair a couple of days after he won the NDP leadership last year, and Harper himself received a call from then-prime-minister Paul Martin in 2004, when he became leader of the Conservative party — a gesture his staff called “gracious” at the time.

Mulcair reportedly made a few attempts to get through to Trudeau right after he won on April 14 and left a message, but the two men didn’t connect until they saw each other before question period in the Commons the next day, and had a brief, private chat. Harper expressed his congratulations more publicly, in his reply to Trudeau’s first question as Liberal leader.

That same day, the Conservative party unleashed a wave of ads questioning Trudeau’s fitness to govern — a saturation-coverage TV campaign that is supposed to be accompanied by the mass mail-out in June.

Trudeau said he’s not surprised that some Conservatives are balking at the idea of the attack ads, because he believes that many people in the public are repelled by them, too.

“I do know that we have a bit of a self-regulating system, in the response that I’ve seen right across the country, of people who are fed up with the negativity, the malicious, personal attacks that this government is engaged in,” Trudeau told reporters.

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