Mad Max Bernier: Conservative rogue

Stephen Harper keeps most of his politicians on a short leash, so why can't he stop Bernier from digging up the garden all the time?

You have to wonder where Conservative MP Maxime Bernier would be today if he hadn’t made the spectacular mistake of leaving sensitive documents at his girlfriend’s house in 2008. He was minister of foreign affairs at the time, and his girlfriend had ties to the Hell’s Angels. So it was 'kind of big deal,' as they say in Ottawa. He had to resign from cabinet, and now he’s the Tories’ renegade backbencher.

This week he rustled some feathers when he suggested that Ottawa stop paying $40 billion a year to the provinces’ health care costs, and let health care become exclusive provincial jurisdiction, as outlined in the Constitution. “He actually wants Canadian politicians to follow the Constitution. The nerve!” scoffs Sun Media’s Brian Lilley. “What Bernier suggested was that we, as a country, return to running the place the way our Fathers of Confederation intended.” This argument is always a bit tricky of course because the Fathers had some intentions about things like oh, women, black people, and Indians that are probably best left buried in 1867, but you have to admire Lilley’s enthusiasm for history.

The Ottawa Citizen’s Susan Riley wonders why “in a political party reduced to mindless cheering squad, the buoyant Conservative member for Beauce keeps saying the most provocative things.” Bernier’s broken ranks on a number of issues, from funding Quebec City’s hockey arena to privatizing health care, yet our dissent-phobic PM stays mum. “Perhaps because Bernier holds the only sure-fire Conservative seat in Quebec. Perhaps because allowing him to preach hard-right economic gospel serves as a release valve -- a signal … that the flame of fiscal conservatism still flickers in Ottawa.”

If that’s the case, National Post columnist and alliteration fan Don Martin is reading that signal loud and clear. He praises “Mad Max” for, just a day after a budget update that “would make a left-lurching Liberal blush at the historic high tide in a red fiscal sea,” delivering “a jolt of hard-right policy to remind true blue Conservatives they have at least one voice on the government’s backbenches”