Who Jean Charest?
Is he the saviour of the Conservative Party of Canada – the unifier that the party, having lost its way, needs to guide it back to the path to power?
Or is he the wedge that will shatter the dysfunctional Conservatives into geographic and ideological splinters, remnants of a movement that trapped itself on the wrong side of history by not recognizing or accepting how the country was changing around it?
On the face of it, the better answer is the latter one. Charest, who declared his candidacy in Calgary on Thursday night, enters the race, a polarizing force when the party is already doing its very best to fly apart without his assistance. He is not an Andrew Scheer or an Erin O’Toole. He is not a lump of potter’s clay, to be manipulated into whatever form and pointed in whatever direction seems most opportune at a given moment.
Jean Charest is what he is and what he has been. And therein lies the problem. In a career spanning four intermittent decades, he has been too many things in too many capacities for the comfort of many Conservatives. He was a Progressive Conservative, which wins him few points in the party that Stephen Harper built on the bones of the old one. Worse, he was minister of the environment when Brian Mulroney signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and committed Canada to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Even worse, after five promising years as national leader of the PCs, he turned Liberal and became premier of Quebec. He not only blasted the Harper government when it pulled Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol, but he made Quebec’s the first government in Canada to put a price on carbon by introducing a cap-and-trade system – moves earned him the enduring enmity of Harper and branded him in the eyes of the powerful Harper wing of the party as a traitor or deserter and as a radical environmentalist who might write off the petroleum industry in his zeal to make Canada green.
My first instinct was to go with the second answer, to see Charest as being more likely to sink than to save the party. I was (and still am) inclined to the view that he will have more difficulty getting to Stornoway, the home of the leader of the opposition, than he would getting from there to Rideau Cottage, the “temporary” abode of the prime minister.
On reflection – and with COVID’s worst seemingly behind us and the lessons of the “Freedom Convoy” fresh in memory – it seems to me that the electorate is thoroughly tired of petty partisanship and politicians who embrace only one policy – not one of ideas, but of tactics: to insult, abuse and snipe relentlessly at their opponents. Pierre Poilievre, the early frontrunner and perhaps unstoppable candidate, is the epitome of ugly negative politics.
If I’m right (no guarantees there), if Conservatives can accept that they need someone with experience and legitimate leadership credentials, not a sniper or another malleable lump of clay, then Charest, baggage notwithstanding, has a real chance. He is a leader. He demonstrated it during the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, when, with the “No” side in disarray, he took over and helped save the day. No one who lived through and wrote about that frenzied campaign will forget his fire, his eloquence and his passion for Canada.
Leaders rise to occasions. Charest would give the Conservatives a worthy opponent to take on Justin Trudeau or whomever the Liberals might throw up against him. This assumes the party will allow him to make it that far.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is a former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. He is the co-author of Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com