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While some say we’re dealing with a different Mad Max — unhinged, unreasonable — there’s not much different from the man today from who he was two years ago, when he narrowly lost the Conservative Party of Canada leadership to Andrew Scheer.

The main difference is the sell. He’s still confident in his pitch, but you can tell he knows he’s selling a long shot and trying to convince you otherwise.

“It’s a very big challenge,” Bernier admits, but brags about putting together 338 riding associations. “We did that before the end of December… I didn’t expect to have, after five months, more than 35,000 members and riding associations across the country.”

While more modest ambitions would be for the PPC to influence the main parties, Bernier thinks he has a shot at joining their ranks, citing the career path of Emmanuel Macron as an example.

“Macron was Socialist [the governing party] 11 months before the presidential election,” says Bernier. “He quit his party, formed a new party and now he’s president of France.”

While Bernier’s no Trudeau fan, the politician he criticized most was Scheer. “If you’re a real conservative who believes in free markets, you must be against the cartel of supply management, you must be against crony capitalism, you must be against corporate welfare. But he’s not,” Bernier says of the current Conservative leader.

He even accuses Scheer of copying him. Like how Bernier opposed Canada signing the UN’s Global Compact for Migration before Scheer did. He chalks this up to his belief that the Tories come up with their ideas by polling rather than going with their gut.