The Federal Tories Must Say "Nay" to Jean Charest

By Henry Srebrnik, (Fredericton, NB) Daily Gleaner

With Andrew Scheer stepping down as Conservative Party leader following his recent election defeat, the names of many potential contenders to succeed him are being brought forward. One of them is Jean Charest.

Both of English Canada’s Toronto-based national newspapers have been beating the drums for him. In the National Post, Jackson Doughart and Chris Selley have called on Charest to enter the ring, and the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson has done likewise.

Montreal’s Le Devoir finally got Charest to comment. “The information is true that I am in the process of considering (the question),” Charest told the newspaper a few days ago.

But, while he brings many positive qualities to the table, electing him would be a mistake. I say this looking at the recent history of this fractured federation’s fault lines.

Jean Charest was a 26-year-old lawyer from Sherbrooke, Que., when first elected in 1984 as Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives came to power.

Later a cabinet minister in Mulroney’s government, Charest lost the Conservative leadership in 1993 to Kim Campbell after Mulroney stepped down but became leader of the truncated party when Campbell was defeated in the 1993 federal election.

Leader of the rump PC caucus until 1998, Charest then joined the Quebec Liberal Party and led it to victory in 2003, becoming Liberal premier of the province until 2012, when he lost to the sovereigntist Parti Québécois.

So Charest, formerly a federal Progressive Conservative and a provincial Liberal, epitomizes what many have come to call the Laurentian elites, the central Canadian economic and political rulers of the country, who are mostly located in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle. 

Ibbitson himself coined the term in a 2011 article, later expanded into a book, where he defined them as “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada.

As the Laurentians presided, their worldview ruled. The lack of competition gave them ideological hegemony but has created social and political rifts outside central Canada.

This ruling class, in the period between 1987 and 1995, was responsible for almost allowing the country to be ripped apart.

Those of us old enough to remember this period, from the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords through the near-fatal Quebec Referendum, recall that it destroyed the old Progressive Conservative Party and led to the rise of the Bloc Québécois and the western-based Reform Party.

Angered by western Canada being again on the losing end of an election, University of Calgary political science professor Barry Cooper wrote on Nov. 10 in the C2C Journal, “The imperative is to cast off the yoke of Laurentian Canada − and soon.”

Charest has never been an MP in the reconstituted Conservative Party of Stephen Harper – Canada’s only western-based prime minister in office who lasted more than a year since way back in 1963, the year Tory John Diefenbaker was defeated by Lester Pearson. That alone speaks volumes about this country -- and, not coincidentally, both Diefenbaker and Harper were detested in much of central Canada.

I lived and taught in Calgary during the early 1990s and felt the anger Albertans had towards the eastern-based elites. I predicted Reform would sweep the west in the 1993 federal election, when most pundits refused to believe it could happen.

So, given this history, why would the Conservatives choose as their leader a former Liberal Party premier of Quebec? Would the Liberals choose a former Alberta Tory to head their party? 

Charest is not in any sense of the word a conservative and his record has been one as a foot soldier for the Laurentian elites and at best another federalist Quebecer like Brian Mulroney.

He would lose much of the west and gain little in the rest of Canada outside Quebec and the Maritimes, especially if the next Liberal leader will be (as I suspect) Chrystia Freeland.

This is shallow opportunism and in no way would differentiate the party Stephen Harper created from the humdrum liberal centre that is today’s Canada. 

A Charest at the helm of the Conservative Party would amount to the revenge of the old PCs and would inevitably lead to a Reform Party 2.0 and perhaps even a “Wexit” by Alberta and Saskatchewan. As for the Bloc, they’re already back!