With less than a year until the next federal election, Maxime Bernier was in B.C. last week drumming up support for his nascent party.

People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier was running late for his meeting with the Vancouver Sun and Province editorial board.

His aide was the recently elected vice-president of a Vancouver Island constituency association, a voluble, stay-at-home mom who has never been involved in politics before. Wobbling off to try to locate her leader, I empathized as she confided that it was the first time in seven years that she had worn high heels.

Distroscale

Bernier arrived all suave and Gallic in a well-fitted blue suit, topped with a camel coat and apologies in both official languages, bringing his quixotic campaign to B.C. on the first stop of a Western Canadian roadshow.

He was flanked by political gadfly Gurmant Grewal and two young men, young enough that they might have been wearing their high-school graduation suits.

The meeting began awkwardly when managing editor Valerie Casselton introduced herself.

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“My first girlfriend was Valerie,” he said. “It wasn’t me,” she replied. Undeterred by her discomfort, Bernier sailed on for a bit about her lovely name.

With less than a year until the federal election, Bernier is on an audacious quest to create a party based on the same platform that federal Conservatives rejected in 2017 when Bernier lost his leadership bid to Andrew Scheer by a narrow margin.

It stresses individualism, freedom, smaller government, flat taxes, reduced immigration, an end to corporate handouts — including supply management — and an environmental policy grounded in the belief that the free market is able to solve the challenges of climate change.

During the Reform Party’s heyday in 1997, it took 25 of 34 seats here with similar policies. Two decades later, British Columbia has nearly a million more people and is a much-changed province.

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Still, Bernier’s party already has riding associations in 29 of B.C.’s 42 constituencies, and 4,132 members. Nationally, it has 110 of 338 riding associations up and 31,000 people as founding members.

And, even before the party is eligible to give out tax receipts, Bernier said it has raised $465,000 of the $3.5 million it needs to campaign next year.

A rally planned for that night was supposed to attract 600, or maybe it was 300. The organizers weren’t sure.

Certainly, Bernier’s well-rehearsed platform and urbanity contrast sharply with Scheer’s aw-shucks, dimples and social-conservative values. But will Bernier’s party do anything more than simply destroy Conservatives’ hopes of defeating Justin Trudeau’s Liberals?

With its emphasis on limiting immigration and not forcibly changing the cultural and social fabric of Canada, can Bernier steer clear of inflaming and attracting white nationalists?

Bernier insists that he can do all of that and that he can draw votes from all parties, including fiscally conservative Liberals of the Paul Martin and Jean Chretien eras, disaffected New Democrats, and the one-third of Canadians who don’t vote.

He said he plans to target millennial voters who, for the first time in 2019, will outnumber baby boomers. But there’s nothing in the platform to address some of their top concerns.

Asked about the housing affordability crisis, Bernier repeated the failed trickle-down economics’ notion that lower taxes fix everything.

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He opposes federal investment in urban infrastructure, including rapid-transit expansion, that helps ease the commuting burden on first-time homebuyers forced out to the suburbs.

Then, there’s the environment. Bernier is opposed to a carbon tax. He’s pro-pipeline, although he agreed with the Supreme Court of Canada decision that it requires adequate consultation. He doesn’t deny that climate change has a human-caused component, but Bernier hedges, saying he’s not a scientist.

On immigration, Bernier has had to fend off approaches from the far-right Canadian Nationalist Party and accusations of xenophobia after he called immigration “a burden” and promised fewer immigrants and refugees.

He insists it’s possible to have a debate about immigration policy without inflaming white nationalism by appealing “not to people’s emotions, but to their intelligence” by doing what he calls “smart populism”.

Even so, he has hired a company to screen constituency executives and candidates and sift through their social media posts for anything that might embarrass the party.

But Bernier himself has a checkered past. A decade ago, the then-foreign affairs minister was forced to resign from Stephen Harper’s government after a security breach. He left a briefcase full of classified documents at his girlfriend’s house.

(It is at least one of the reasons Bernier has refused to talk about Tony Clement’s dismissal from the Conservative caucus this week over a potential national security breach following extortion threats after Clement had sent sexually explicit photos to a woman.)

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Yet, with Grewal at his side, Bernier seems prepared to at least flirt with a bit of danger. A three-term MP, Grewal was a member of the Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative parties.

In 2005, he produced tapes of what he claimed were attempts by federal Liberals to induce him to join the party. (The Liberals were cleared of any wrongdoing.) Grewal was later investigated and cleared by the RCMP of depositing political donations into his personal account.

Are we ready for mad Max in Lotusland? Of course. We’ve always had a soft spot for outliers. But it’s 2018, and two decades after the Reform Party’s success here, British Columbia is a much different place than it was.

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