Charest tries to repeat history with Conservative leadership bid
It’s just after 9 a.m. on a Friday morning at Wilfrid’s Restaurant in the
Chateau Laurier and guests are helping themselves to a breakfast buffet when Jean Charest takes his seat in the corner of the room.
This iconic hotel down the street from Parliament Hill, the scene of so many political tete-a-tetes and soirees, is about as cliche a meeting place as you can get in official Ottawa. It’s somehow entirely appropriate.
Charest, who is vying to become leader of the federal Conservative party in a contest that wraps up Sept. 10, settles down in front of the $24 yogurt parfait his press secretary ordered up before his arrival and opens the top button of his white shirt. Before beginning an interview, he chit-chats: Where are you from? Are you bilingual? After the tape recorder is off, picking at the raspberries: Live nearby? Any kids?
Ever the retail politician, Charest is on a first-name basis with the waiter and treats him just as warmly. He’s on a first-name basis with many of Canada’s political giants, too, dropping names like “Lucien” into the conversation knowing that there’s no need to explain who he’s talking about. (That’s Lucien Bouchard, a former premier of Quebec and an important figure in its sovereignty movement.)
“I’ve had to reintroduce myself in this campaign,” he says, looking back on his long career in both federal and provincial politics, before a more recent 10-year stint in the private sector. “I did not expect when I started that it would be a 28-year run. I didn’t expect all the turns, the events. I had a lot of moments of success and also a lot of moments where there were failures. And moments of elation and moments of disappointment. I’ve had them all.”
He says he’s no “choir boy” and “you’re not sitting in front of a saint.” But he’s here to make a case that his experience has more than prepared him to lead, and, in a way, that history can and should repeat itself. It’s far from his first rodeo.
It’s not even the first time others have convinced Charest to run for leadership of a party.
In 1998, when Charest was leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, he bowed to mounting pressure from other politicians and the public to take over leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, which is separate from the federal Liberal party.
It was five years later, during the 2003 provincial election, when Conservative MP Alain Rayes encountered him for the first time. “I lost that election because of Jean Charest,” he says in an interview in French. He ran for the Action democratique du Quebec and lost to a Liberal. He remains convinced this was “clear proof” of Charest’s political magic.
Charest won his party a majority government and remained premier for nine years. If he has been reintroducing himself to voters during the federal leadership campaign, it has been with a careful effort not to reintroduce them to his baggage.
Though Charest’s approach to Quebec’s fiscal situation was lauded and the province fared better than almost anywhere else during the 2008-09 financial crisis, he was consistently plagued by unproven corruption allegations and several of his ministers had to step aside because of conflict of interest allegations. A lengthy investigation into alleged illegal financing in the provincial Liberal party under his leadership only wrapped up early this year without recommending any charges to police. Charest is suing the province over it.
Though he bristles today at any accusation he hasn’t been aligned with the federal Conservative party, he wasn’t always a friend to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
During a tighter campaign in the
2007 provincial election, Harper agreed to increase federal transfers to Quebec, which came at a political cost. But Charest used some of that money to make income tax cuts, to the consternation of other premiers.
Asked whether it’s possible to draw a straight line from that event to Harper’s endorsement of his opponent, Charest said any animosity is on the former prime minister’s side. But he couldn’t resist quipping: “Now, a Conservative disappointed in reducing income taxes is a novelty.”
Marc-Andre Leclerc was the Conservative party’s director of political operations for Quebec during Charest’s last couple of years as premier. “We never saw him like an ally,” he says. “After his retirement, we did not see him involved in the party.” Of course, Leclerc concedes, “it’s good politics to fight against Ottawa,” especially in Quebec.
Charest left office in 2012 on the heels of massive student demonstrations that sprang up after his government moved to raise tuition fees in Quebec universities, and later introduced a bill that would impose restrictions on protests.
Asked whether he has any regrets, Charest says, “it wouldn’t be honest for anyone to tell you that, ‘No, I did everything exactly the way it should’ve been done.”’ For a specific example, he said he would have differed in his approach to labour laws.
“I think I changed seven of them in the same year and really made the unions my adversaries,” he says. “I would’ve done that differently.”
There’s one anecdote that Charest does want to highlight, saying, “it tells a story about me and about this race and who I am.”