Former Tory cabinet minister Tom McMillan: "Whosever's party it is, it damn well isn't mine."

In 2003, Stephen Harper, then the leader of the Canadian Alliance, sat beside Peter MacKay, then the leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, and announced the birth of the Conservative Party of Canada. 

For Canadian conservatism as we know it today, it was a seminal moment. 

But when former Mulroney cabinet minister Tom McMillan looks back at that day, he sees a hostile takeover that transformed the party he once revered into one he no longer recognizes. 

He tells Michael the party has become "a vehicle for right-wing ideologues in the American tradition, not the Canadian progressive tradition - so whosever party it is, it damn well isn't mine."

McMillan's new book is called Not My Party: The Rise and Fall of Canadian Tories, from Robert Stanfield to Stephen Harper. It is part political memoir, part manifesto.

With the leadership convention coming up, the party faces a fork in the road. It can go in the direction that the Harperites took the party, or it can take a different path, one that's truer to the soul of the traditional Conservative Party. And which fork it takes, I think, will set a path of no return.- Tom McMillan

Tom McMillan was policy secretary to Robert Stanfield, the former leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party. He was elected as the Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Hillsborough, PEI in 1979, and served as an MP for nine years. 

He was a cabinet minister in Brian Mulroney's government, serving first as a Minister of State for tourism, and then as Minister of the Environment. As environment minister, he worked on both the US-Canada acid rain accord and the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. 

Click the button above to hear Michael's interview with Tom McMillan.