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On paper, Maxime Bernier would seem the Conservatives’ dream candidate: a free marketer from Quebec, with enough native-son appeal to win seats in his home province yet with the sort of tax-cutting, smaller-government message that can appeal to Western Canadians. Throw in good looks, passable bilingualism and a certain goofy charm and you can see why so many are so excited about his campaign. Why do I remain so hesitant?

The standard knock on Bernier is that his policies are too “extreme” to be electable. Leave aside for the moment the question of electability: are they extreme? For the most part, no. They may fairly be called “radical,” in the sense that they imply large changes in existing policy. But in the main they draw upon mainstream economic theory, longstanding proposals with impeccable expert pedigrees, or existing practice in other countries.

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The notion that the federal government has the powers under the constitution to strike down interprovincial trade barriers is no more than conventional legal wisdom; that it should use those powers has often been proposed, most recently by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. The idea of converting federal transfers to the provinces into tax points is likewise hardly revolutionary: it has been discussed in one forum or another for more than thirty years.