It’s just after 9am on a Friday morning at Wilfrid’s restaurant at Château Laurier where guests are eating a buffet breakfast when Jean Charest takes his seat in the corner of the room.
This iconic hotel down the street from Parliament Hill, scene of so many political tête-à-têtes and soirées, is about as cliche a meeting place as you can get in official Ottawa. It’s kind of fitting.
Charest, who is vying to become leader of the federal Conservative Party in a contest that ends Sept. 10, settles down in front of the $24 yogurt parfait his press secretary ordered before his arrival and unbuttons the top button of his white shirt. Before starting an interview, he babbles: Where are you from? Are you bilingual? After turning off the tape deck, picking raspberries: Live nearby? Are there any children?
Ever the retail politician, Charest is on a first-name basis with the waiter and treats him just as warmly. He’s also on first name terms with many of Canada’s political giants, dropping names like “Lucien” into conversation knowing he doesn’t need to explain who he’s talking about. (This is Lucien Bouchard, a former premier of Quebec and an important figure in its sovereignty movement.)
“I had to reinvent 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 didn’t expect when I started that it would be a 28-year period. I didn’t expect all the twists and turns. I had many moments of success and also many moments where there were failures. moments of elation and moments of disappointment. I had them all.”
He says he’s not a “choir boy” and “you don’t sit in front of a saint.” But he is here to prove that his experience has prepared him for more than leading, and in some ways history can and should repeat itself. This is far from his first rodeo.
This isn’t even the first time others have persuaded Sharest to run for party leadership.
In 1998, when Charest was leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, he bowed to mounting pressure from other politicians and the public to assume leadership of the Liberal Party of Quebec, which is separate from the federal Liberal Party.
Five years later, during the 2003 provincial election, Conservative MP Allen Reiss met him for the first time. “I lost this election because of Jean Charest,” he says in an interview in French. He ran for the Action démocratique du Québec and lost to a Liberal. He remains convinced that this is “clear proof” of Sharest’s political magic.
Charest won his party a majority government and remained prime minister for nine years. If he reintroduced himself to voters during the federal leadership campaign, it was with a careful effort not to re-introduce them into his baggage.
MORE: Jean Charest: A look at the Conservative candidate’s key promises
Although Charest’s approach to Quebec’s fiscal situation has been praised, and the province fared better than almost anywhere else during the 2008-09 financial crisis, he has been constantly dogged by unproven allegations of corruption and several of his ministers had to withdraw due to allegations of conflict of interest. A lengthy investigation into alleged illegal funding in the provincial Liberal Party under his leadership only ended earlier this year with no police charges recommended. Charest is suing the province for it.
Although today he bristles at any accusation that he is out of touch with the federal Conservative Party, he wasn’t always friends with former prime minister Stephen Harper.
During a tougher 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 cut income taxes, to the dismay of other prime ministers.
Asked if it was possible to draw a straight line from that event to Harper’s support for his opponent, Charest said any animosity was on the former prime minister’s side. But he couldn’t resist quipping: “Now a Conservative frustrated with income tax cuts is a novelty.”
Marc-André Leclerc was the Conservative Party’s director of political operations for Quebec during Charest’s last few years as premier. “We never saw him as an ally,” he says. “After his retirement, we did not see him participating in the party. Of course, Leclerc admits that “it’s good politics to fight Ottawa,” especially in Quebec.
Charest left office in 2012 following mass student demonstrations that erupted after his government moved to raise tuition fees at Quebec universities and later introduced a bill that would have imposed restrictions on protests.
Asked if he has any regrets, Charest says, “It wouldn’t be fair for someone to tell you, ‘No, I did everything exactly the way it was supposed to be done.'” As a specific example, he said he would have differed in his approach to labor law.
“I think I replaced seven of them that year and really turned the unions into my adversaries,” he says. “I would do it differently.”
There’s one anecdote that Charest really wants to emphasize, saying, “it tells a story about me and this race and who I am.”
With public support growing in Quebec for a policy aimed at wearing religious symbols, Charest created a commission in 2007, led by philosopher Charles Taylor and historian Gérard Bouchard, to look into the issue of accommodating religious beliefs.
The commission recommended that people in certain positions – judges, prosecutors, police and prison guards – not wear religious clothing or symbols. Charest wouldn’t bite.
“It would be more popular for me to do it than not to do it. I said no because I just didn’t believe in it.”
There is a link to Charest’s position today. He says that if he were prime minister and Quebec’s secularism law — Bill 21, which prohibits certain government officials from wearing religious symbols while on the job — was to be challenged in the Supreme Court, his government would intervened and argued against the limitation of Charter rights.
Reyes, who believes the importance of Bill 21 in the Conservative leadership race has been exaggerated, was the first to approach Charest to come to the aid of a shaky federal party earlier this year. He and others worked “very hard” to convince him, he says, and they succeeded. He thinks Quebecers will rally behind Charest.
Shortly after criticizing how modern politicians are always chasing “shiny objects,” a tacit critique of social media, Charest is on Sparks Street, a few blocks from the Hill, looking for a place to buy a newspaper. Like the hotel date, except perhaps for the price of yogurt, it’s another moment that feels detached from time. One might have bumped into Charest when he was last MP and had the same interaction.
Sociologist Philippe Fournier says Charest is a gifted debater and formidable activist. This has always been true.
As a future prime minister today, he may have a “hard ceiling” in Quebec, where some voters will not forgive Charest for some of his moves as premier or even for his role in the No campaign against secession in the 1995 referendum. .
But Fournier says there is no doubt Charest will win the next federal election if he wins now, an outcome he sees as highly unlikely.
“When you think about it, it would have been a great story.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on September 4, 2022.
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