You could cut the nostalgia with a knife on Saturday, during the conventum of the former liberal years. They and they were almost all there, former ministers and political advisers, companions of three great electoral victories under the leadership of the man they have missed since the day of his departure: Jean Charest.
His departure is a way of speaking. Because he did everything to stay, in 2012, and almost succeeded. Admittedly, a majority of Quebecers wanted to turn the page—their dissatisfaction rate was 70%—a page smeared with allegations that the Charbonneau commission was preparing, in the following fall, to put in order and light.
But Charest had found a method to overcome the ambient electoral disenchantment. His nifty idea of raising tuition fees by 82% had provoked the largest period of student protests in our history, punctuated by student and police violence. The Prime Minister and his government had done much to associate the entire student movement with the violence. And, although he initially said that it would be “grotesque and despicable” to choose the period of forced return to school to call Quebecers to the polls, that is precisely what he did.
For what ? Because enough Quebecers blamed the students for the violence, rather than the state, to offer Charest a chance of salvation. He represented law and order. The students: illegality and disorder. If he could channel the election around this issue alone, he had a real chance of surviving.
It was still necessary that the violence be there, still fresh in the memory of the voters. Hence its electoral calendar: mid-August, back to school, alleged refusal of student associations to let non-striking students cross the picket lines, new violent clashes between students and police.
Charest had carefully chosen the date of the election so that these scenes of violence unfold from the start of the campaign. Just before the debates where, like a reincarnation of Richard Nixon facing the new hippies, the liberal leader would pose as the avenger of the silent majority, law, order and clean-shaven faces, against these violent anarchists sporting squares red and three-day beards. His victory, under these conditions, would be the greatest achievement of his career.
There remained one detail: that the students play the score intended for them in this planned drama. However, they showed a maturity that Charest and his strategists had not foreseen: they voted for an electoral truce and returned to class. One of them – the most popular -, Léo Bureau-Blouin, who presented himself under the colors of the PQ, pushed for the vote, rather than for crime. Above all, the favorite bogeyman of the Liberals, the one they loved to hate, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson for the radical association CLASSE, candidly announced that he was retiring from his duties and from the stage to, a- he explained wisely, “remove a target from Jean Charest”.
Deprived of his dream scenario, Jean Charest bit the dust. But its margin of defeat was extremely thin, less than 1% difference with the winning Parti Québécois. It is therefore certain that, if, as he had hoped, violence had spread to campuses in August 2012, he would have snatched his re-election on the back of cayenne pepper, blood and broken shin bones.
More than the allegations surrounding the financing of his party, this episode has forever tarnished in my mind the memory and the record of the former Prime Minister, because it illustrates a dangerous lack of political scruples when he is pushed into his last entrenchments.
It’s a shame, because we can’t deny his great political skill, his talents as a communicator, his ability to form a team and keep it essentially united, despite the insults. Of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada last year, he was in my opinion the best prepared intellectually to one day lead the country, the dream of his life.
Last Saturday evening, he offered the 500 former members of the Charest era gathered in front of him an astonishing performance, it is reported. If he decided to seek his former position, leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, no one doubts that a coronation would be organized for him. (This was not the case for another comeback from Liberal limbo, Robert Bourassa, who had to fight to regain the scepter in 1983.)
Will Charest dive? He says no, it’s normal. But his Conservative campaign gave the water temperature last year. The Charest team was unable to convince enough Quebec Liberals to take up CCP membership, and Pierre Poilievre suffered a humiliating defeat among the delegates in Quebec, even in his own hometown of Sherbrooke.
“Nostalgia is no longer what it used to be”, affirmed in its delicious title the autobiography of Simone Signoret. Among Quebec Liberals, nostalgia for the Charest era could not be more at odds with the memory of their former leader’s opinion. Last year, so 10 years after his departure, 72% of Quebecers admitted to Léger having a bad opinion of Jean Charest, 24% being of the opposite opinion.
All the other former prime ministers are doing better, except one: Philippe Couillard.
But wouldn’t this catastrophic starting point make the political resurrection of Jean Charest even more remarkable?
How would a future debate with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois be?
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