Conservative leadership contender Maxime Bernier — reportedly neck-in-neck in popularity with Shark Tanker Kevin O’Leary — is a different kind of political animal.

He is perhaps best described as a cat, with many of those mythical nine lives having already been tested.

Once a veritable unknown from the Quebec riding of Beauce, all that came to an end when the dashing then-45-year-old politician with the Playboy image showed up at Rideau Hall in 2007 to be sworn in as foreign affairs minister in the Harper government with an exceedingly attractive woman wearing an exceedingly low-cut dress.

The motor-drives of press photographers’ cameras went into full fury and later had to be iced down.

The woman’s name was Julie Couillard. A year later, Bernier finally resigned after weeks of being defended by Prime Minister Stephen Harper for leaving classified cabinet documents at Couillard’s Montreal-area home, it turned out she had some interesting ties to organized crime, namely outlaw biker gangs.

And it wasn’t just a passing fantasy. Not only was Couillard once married to a biker, she had also lived with another gangster who was murdered during the violent and bloody territorial wars of the 1990s.

Already considered gaffe-prone in government circles, and saddled with the pejorative nickname of Mad Max, Bernier was unceremoniously banished to the wasteland of Harper government’s back benchers to do both time and penance.

It wasn’t until Harper’s last days in power did Bernier get another role, albeit in junior positions as Minister of State.

His detractors were quick to tick off the negative boxes. There was the time, for example, when Bernier mused aloud while visiting troops in Afghanistan that the governor of Kandahar province should be turfed from his job, all which threw a wrench in the diplomatic corps’ quiet work behind the scenes to do just that.

Then there was his jet-setting ways, as in a $22,500 airline flight to a two-day conference in Laos, but with a stopover in Paris.

None of this matters a whit, however, to the good voters of Beauce. Bernier has been elected four times, all with hefty majorities, following in the footsteps of his father, Gilles, a well-known radio host who had represented the riding for 13 years, first as a Progressive Conservative and then as an Independent.

Max Bernier, not surprisingly, paints himself as a libertarian and often hauls out quotes attributed to the classic liberalism of Friedrich Hayek or the common-sense economics of Henry Hazlitt.

All which is another reason some have long called him Mad Max, not that it bothers Bernier who, to his credit, now embraces it.

A recent fundraising meme, in fact, shows Bernier’s head atop the leather-clad body of actor Mel Gibson, strolling down a dusty road in a scene from the original Mad Max movie.

And, not surprisingly again, it suited him.

He is the only candidate mad enough, for example, to campaign on bringing an end to supply management, as well as all corporate subsidies, even if it involves Quebec’s sacred cow, Bombardier.

A year ago, Press Progress, a left-wing political site run by the Broadbent Institute, laid out the odds regarding who would be the next leader of the federal Conservatives.

It had Jason Kenney at 5:1. It had Tony Clement at 8:1.

Neither are in play. Kenney now leads the provincial Tories in Alberta, and Clement long ago backed out of the race.

Maxime Bernier, back then, was given 25:1 odds of being the next Conservative leader, while Kevin O’Leary was a 50:1 longshot.

Neither had been given a hope in hell.

Today, however, it could be as close a coin flip.