Scandal-plagued Charest faces tough odds
Just how many lives does Jean Charest have?
We’ll find out Sept. 4, when Quebecers go to the polls and either give him a historic fourth mandate, or not.
The last Quebec premier to win a fourth consecutive mandate was Maurice Duplessis, in 1956, back when it was nearly illegal to vote for anyone else.
Albertans are more faithful to their premiers — both Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein had four straight mandates — but winning four in a row is normally quite a trick.
Even Manitoba’s skilful Gary Doer bowed out after three, moving to a soft billet as Canada’s ambassador in Washington, D.C., rather than face the people again. Ontario’s Dalton McGuinty squeaked out a minority in his third time at bat.
Voters eventually get tired of governments. Arrogance creeps in. Talented lieutenants retire. Insiders enrich themselves and their pals, and news eventually gets out. Voters get tired of seeing the same mug on TV.
Charest looks to have run out of lives. A series of lurid revelations has forced him to call a public inquiry into corruption in the construction industry, which will conveniently get down to serious work not long after the election.
In an ideal world, Quebecers would throw the Liberals out of office on Sept. 4, punishing them for presiding over a system that allowed mob-linked con- struction contractors to systematically rip off taxpayers, and Charest starts the election behind in the polls. If the election is about corruption, Charest will lose, so PQ chief Pauline Marois will seek opportunities to remind Quebecers of fishy contracts, strange Caribbean boat rides and crumbling overpasses.
It may play out like the 2006 federal election, when the Conservatives were able to hammer Paul Martin’s Liberals for the sponsorship scandal, and Martin responded by warning that electing the Conservatives would be very bad for Canada.
That does not mean that the outcome will be the same. Harper won because he successfully weathered Martin’s counterattacks, and also because midcampaign, the RCMP announced that they were in- vestigating the Liberals for insider trading, which they ought not to have done, since that wasn’t among the Liberals’ sins.
Marois can’t count on a similar boost from the Surete du Quebec, and she will have to handle withering attacks from Charest.
The massive student tuition protests that morphed into a pot-banging, Occupystyle street celebration have allowed Charest to draw a contrast between himself and Marois, who may have erred by wearing a red square and awkwardly banging a pot.
Most Quebecers oppose the protests, and Charest referred Wednesday to those Quebecers as the “silent majority,” a term popularized by Richard Nixon when he faced large but unpopular protests.
Like every incumbent politician in every election since the financial crisis got serious, Charest will frame the election as a choice between stability and chaos.
The track record must give him reason to hope. Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper won his majority last spring, there have been six provincial elections. The governing party has won all of them by telling voters that change would be an unacceptable risk.
None of the governments had as much of a cloud over them as Charest’s does, but the Parti Quebecois faces a unique challenge, since it wants to found a new country, a prospect the party is sometimes tempted to soft pedal during campaigns.
“Every day I will speak about sovereignty,” Marois said Wednesday, but she wouldn’t say under what circumstances she might call a referendum.
This gives Charest a target, since Quebecers don’t seem to be in the mood to discuss separating.
But there is a wild card in the deck, in the person of Francois Legault, the leader of the Coalition Avenir Quebec. Legault, a former PQ minister and self-made millionaire, is proposing a 10-year moratorium on referendum talk, while the province focuses on getting its fiscal and social house in order, a message that struck a chord.
He has a chance to make his pitch, but he is less experienced than his rivals. But he is a more serious contender than Mario Dumont, the last third-party leader to challenge the PQLiberal divide.
I wouldn’t put any money on this one.