Run, Jean, run, shake things up
Charest in Tory leader race could unleash ideas
In slightly different circumstances, the idea of the Conservative Party of Canada installing Jean Charest as leader might carry an unsavoury whiff of Joe Clark’s second coming. Surely a healthy party needn’t defrost a former leader, 21 years removed from the job. Surely impressive candidates of subsequent generations should be lining up in droves.
Charest has said only that he’s considering a run, but his resumé is undoubtedly impressive: fluently bilingual, premier of Quebec for a decade, still only 61, and intimately acquainted with the conservative movement and party, having watched both tear themselves apart in the 1990s. But is he someone members of various conservative constituencies could rally around?
His victory would utterly delight the Laurentian Elites — misty- eyed as so many of them are for the days of Red Toryism, when Albertan conservatives were less like Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney and more like … well, Joe Clark for example. What delights Central Canadian pundits rarely delights Western Canadians, where the Conservatives’ base firmly sits today.
The aforementioned pundits will like that Charest is staunchly pro- choice: as Quebec premier he called abortion an “inalienable right.” The 2019 election campaign seemed to cement in Canadian politics and mainstream media the idea that ( conservative) politicians can no longer “check their religion at Parliament’s door”: not only was it insufficient for Andrew Scheer to vow never to legislate on abortion; the question of what he considered sinful came under questioning at press conferences and in opinion columns.
Many pundits would be fine with consigning people like Scheer to the backbenches, literally and figuratively, forever. Not a few conservative politicians would as well.
That needn’t be the outcome: Scheer was extraordinarily inadept at defending himself. Sometimes he barely seemed willing or able to try. For all I know, Charest might be of a mind to tear up so- cons’ membership cards and have security escort them out. But were he inclined to defend the Big Blue Tent as it used to stand, and as stands today after reunification under Harper, he would be well-equipped.
Charest voted for the Mulroney government’s 1988 motion proposing to protect access to abortion in the first trimester while criminalizing it thereafter. In 1990 he voted for Bill C- 43, which codified that. ( The bill died on a tie vote in the Senate.) I suspect Charest would not look like a dimpled deer in headlights trying to explain to a millennial reporter why he and other avowedly prochoice politicians, not least then- justice minister Kim Campbell, did that — namely, because Canadian politics hadn’t yet vanished up its own backside. Its media hadn’t yet adopted holus bolus the literally uniquely Canadian idea that any legal restrictions on abortion whatsoever are ultra vires.
If modern Canadian politics is a quadrennial handbags- at-20- paces battle between Team Red and Team Blue to run things more or less the same, Charest is a veteran of an era when politicians actually tried to do big, risky, different, career-threatening things. He watched the country almost fall apart, and played a significant role in keeping it together.
Unfortunately, Charest accrued as much baggage as you would expect as Quebec premier. His reluctance to call an inquiry into corruption in the construction industry hangs around his neck like a toilet seat, given what we have learned since. UPAC, Quebec’s anti-corruption task force, is still investigating him with respect to illegal fundraising allegations, seven years after he left office. Charest says he is innocent of any wrongdoing. And it is inconvenient in the immediate circumstances that Charest used to collect a $75,000 salary top-up from the Quebec Liberal Party without donors knowing — he considered it purely “a private matter” — and that a new book contains allegations the party paid the mortgage on his Westmount home when he was leader of the opposition .
But at least he has some gravitas. He will not be easily sneered and sniped at. More to the point, he has some perspective: He remembers what politics was like before it was designed mostly to generate the maximum Twitter outrage. ( Maybe he wouldn’t even get an account!) He is a reasonably serious person, at a time when an infuriating streak of contrarian unseriousness runs through Canadian conservatism: Scheer’s famous “I supported Brexit before it was cool” tweet might be the ultimate example.
Charest remembers when Canadian politics mattered, when existential issues hung in the balance. He sat in the first couple of rows, and he did get wet. At the very least, having an elder statesman in the race ought to force the others to behave themselves. Best- case scenario, maybe some big ideas might escape the dusty vault they’ve been stuck in for 25 years.