NOT ‘MAD MAX’ FOR NOTHING,

OTTAWA • Maxime Bernier showed the country Thursday why his self-assigned nickname “Mad Max” is more than a little apt. The 55-year-old veteran MP tore a strip off Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives on Thursday in a dramatic exit from the party he has called home for more than a decade.

But his departure didn’t surprise those who have witnessed his ambitious personal brand of politicking over the years. Bernier “chose himself,” said Michelle Rempel, the Calgary MP who earlier this week challenged Bernier to decide just whom he was working to help — Scheer’s Conservatives or Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

Bernier’s split from the Conservatives started to materialize in May 2017, when he narrowly lost the leadership to Scheer, but the dam burst last week after a series of Bernier’s tweets about “too much diversity” being bad for Canada pushed Scheer to publicly distance himself from the Quebec MP.

The signs of a Mad Max party have been growing since this April, when Bernier published a promotional book chapter calling out Scheer for pandering to “fake Conservatives” in order to win the party leadership. His missives to supporters who signed up on his website have been rife with hints he saw himself as an independent.

Friends watching this all unfold were quietly urging him to step aside gracefully, take a job in the private sector and leave himself room for a comeback once Scheer’s time in the sun was up.

Adam Daifallah, managing partner of Montreal public affairs firm Hatley Strategy Advisors and a longtime observer of conservative politics, says “that possibility is out the window now.”

Bernier’s decision to leave on the morning of the party’s policy convention was a conscious choice to have maximum impact, said Daifallah.

“I don’t see how you could interpret it any other way,” he said.

Bernier was once a Quebec separatist but his politics have long been centred around libertarian ideals.

Even in his pre-political days, Bernier was unbending. In 2001 he was fired from the Quebec Securities Commission because, by his own admission, he challenged the director too much.

In 2007, about a year and a half after being named the minister of industry, he was abruptly moved to foreign affairs. The move came in part because Bernier was quietly trying to push his anti-corporate subsidies ideology even as he directed the department handing them out.

If he irritated party brass in that role, he really stepped in the muck in foreign affairs. First, he suggested the governor of Kandahar was corrupt. Then, he left classified documents at his girlfriend’s home. The latter led to the first time he would be fired from his party’s inner circle.

Still, Bernier’s importance, as a leader among the libertarian wing and a popular Quebec MP, made him too important to keep on the outside for long. In 2011, Prime Minister Stephen Harper pulled him back into cabinet where he stayed until the government’s defeat in 2015.