I do not like Bernier; I adore him. I’m not a joiner, or I would sign up immediately as a member of the Mad Max club

I must retract my earlier expressed regard for former Conservative Max Bernier.

I refer to a recent column in which I said I liked him, and pronounced him a feisty and vibrant fellow.

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Turns out, my mild affection has flowered in mere days into a raging crush. I do not like Bernier; I adore him. I’m not a joiner, or I would sign up immediately as a member of the Mad Max club.

How do I love him?

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

I love how he’s embraced that nickname, apparently given him by advisers to then Conservative PM Stephen Harper and meant of course to denigrate his ability to finesse a problem, as when he was the federal industry minister.

I love him so much I read Chapter 5 of his as yet unpublished book. The chapter is entitled “Live or Die With Supply Management.” Given my reading material tends to the police procedural, preferably Norwegian, this should have been hard work. It wasn’t. Bernier writes like most of us talk.

I love his unabashed use of the word “cartel”— both in this chapter and in his daily language — to describe the supply management system used to keep the price of Canadian dairy, poultry and eggs artificially high.

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There are three pillars, he explains, that support the cartel: one is production control, so that the amount of eggs, milk and poultry is kept to what Canadians are expected to consume; the second is price-fixing how much processors must pay farmers; the third is to impose huge tariffs on imported eggs, milk and poultry.

I love how Bernier says he got a lot of pushback on his use of the word cartel (he is from the Beauce, a region which has the highest numbers of farmers working under supply management), many complaining he was comparing this cartel to a drug cartel.

“The word cartel applies to a system, not to individuals, and it doesn’t necessarily describe criminal behaviour,” he says in his book.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

I love his defence of a genuinely free market — supply management is, he says, “the total opposite of a free market and a conservative party should not be supporting it” — when he faced such local antipathy.

I love his resolute irreverence.

Last weekend, at the Conservative party purported love-fest in Halifax wherein the fold gathered behind Andrew Scheer, Bernier gleefully tweeted, about a reception hosted by the Dairy Farmers of Canada attended by Scheer, many delegates, MPs and senators, “Packed house at the cartel’s party.”

Turns out, as my colleague Colby Cosh wrote Tuesday, a Dairy Farmers of Canada briefing book was discarded, found by a free-trade Calgary delegate and posted online.

It showed that a resolution that would have put the boots to the cartel was suppressed by operatives working for Scheer.

The briefing book described the various ghastly potential outcomes of this resolution; its fail-safe was this:

“The powers of the leader are far-reaching in preventing a policy being in the party platform. DFC has been told by the leader’s office that he will exercise this power and that this policy will not be in the Conservative election platform regardless of the outcome at convention.

“Although not ideal, this does represent a safety net should our other tactics fail.”

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Scheer’s office later said that wasn’t true, and surprise surprise, even offered up as evidence an email from Dairy Farmers CEO Jacques Lefebrve, eschewing the “erroneous information” and duly apologizing for it.

Whatever.

By sheer coincidence, the hideous proposal failed to even make it to a vote.

The cartel business is a real issue at the emergency NAFTA talks now underway in Washington. American farmers want access to the Canadian market. Both the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition are united in the cartel’s ferocious defence, or as the relentless Bernier put it Tuesday in a tweet, “The two factions within the LibCon Party arguing about who is most supportive of supply management.”

I love how, in his book and elsewhere, he describes his gradual disillusionment with the party line on supply management. For a decade, he said, he’d dutifully toed the party’s policy, despite internal misgivings.

Similarly, for years, he remained in the party despite its paralyzing fear of failure, which has seen it adopt un-conservative positions that make it difficult to tell it apart from the Liberals.

In my experience, this is exactly how disillusionment sets in, incrementally. Whether it is for a job or a marriage, most of us make compromises for what we believe is the greater good — until one day, it hits us that we’ve compromised so much there’s little good left. That’s when people leave.

Finally, I love that in his chapter on the cartel, Bernier cheerfully acknowledges that when he began his run for the Conservative leadership, most Canadians knew him only from what he calls “the Couillard affair.”

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She, of course, was Julie Couillard, Bernier’s gorgeous girlfriend back in 2008, when, as foreign affairs minister, he left some confidential briefing papers at her place.

Ever the opportunist, when she realized he’d left documents behind, she didn’t call Bernier, but rather a lawyer to tell him what had happened, and then proceeded to try to shop her story around for cold hard cash (she approached the Toronto Star, the paper said at the time, offering an exclusive interview for $50,000).

Bernier, clearly, had been rendered temporarily sex-struck, a common enough condition. As a friend reminded me this week, “That’s how come I have a wife and two kids.”