The first unofficial debate in the Conservative leadership race did not look very promising for Jean Charest. The event held Thursday as part of a conference of the very unilingual Canada Strong and Free Network brought together the gratin of the Canadian populist right. The organization founded by Preston Manning, the former Reform leader who had made it his mission to overthrow the federal government of Brian Mulroney, of which Mr. Charest was a member, advocates pure and hard conservatism. Going up on the stage Thursday night, the former Liberal premier of Quebec must have had the feeling of falling into a hornet’s nest as the crowd gathered at the Shaw Center in Ottawa only had eyes for his rival Pierre Poilievre.
Even for such a seasoned politician as Mr. Charest, this race for the Conservative leadership must be like an extracorporeal experience. While he boasts of having worked all his life for national unity and stresses the importance of uniting Conservatives of all stripes to win the next federal election, Mr. Charest faces a Mr. Poilievre who instead accuses him of being a liberal intruder in the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) of 2022. While Mr. Charest reminds party activists that an aspiring prime minister must obey the laws of the country, Mr. Poilievre stirs up crowds when he says he is proud to have supported the truckers who held the downtown core of the federal capital hostage for several weeks last winter.
“The average trucker has more integrity in his little finger than you had in your whole scandal-ridden Liberal cabinet,” Mr. Poilievre said to Mr. Charest to the cheers of the crowd. Thursday evening. The attack spoke volumes about Mr. Poilievre’s political style, which focused on destroying real or imagined “enemies”. Mr. Charest accuses him of importing political tactics from the United States and warns Conservative activists against the scorched earth policy favored by Mr. Poilievre.
But the latter’s approach seems to please the current Conservatives more than the more unifying approach of Mr. Charest. These would rather unleash their anger than find common ground. Mr. Poilievre offers them an outlet. His promise to make Canada the freest country in the world is ridiculously simplistic. But unlike Mr. Charest, who asks the Conservatives to take responsibility, Mr. Poilievre gives right-wing activists permission to dream in color.
“It would be a breath of fresh air [que] to have a prime minister in Ottawa who was also the premier of a province,” insisted the man who led Quebec from 2003 to 2012. According to Mr. Charest, he would be the best equipped, as prime minister federal, to work with the provinces to carry out major national projects, such as pipelines. “I want to take a moment to refute once and for all that I am a liberal,” he said, pointing to the improvement in public finances achieved by his liberal government.
Mr. Charest accused Mr. Poilievre of opposing the $700 million tax cut introduced by his government in 2007. This was a risky gamble on Mr. Charest’s part. Everyone knows that Stephen Harper, whose influence within the CPC remains considerable, still does not forgive Mr. Charest for having pleaded at the time for an increase in federal transfers in order to settle the famous federal imbalance. , and then redistributed the extra federal money to Quebec taxpayers himself in the form of a tax cut.
“I respect Stephen Harper and have voted for him in every election [à laquelle] he introduced himself,” said Mr. Charest in a tweet posted on his Twitter account during the debate. The revelation was enough to surprise the main interested party, the relations between the two men having been quite venomous throughout the period when they were in power. Conservatives still accuse Mr. Charest of having sabotaged Mr. Harper’s campaign in Quebec in 2008 by strongly criticizing his government’s cuts to the arts. His exit gave the Bloc Québécois ammunition, while Mr. Harper hoped to make a breakthrough in Quebec.
Mr. Charest gave a completely different speech on Thursday evening, boasting of being the only candidate in the race capable of sending the Bloc MPs to retirement in the next federal election, while promising that with him at its head, a government would participate in a potential challenge to Bill 21 in the Supreme Court of Canada on behalf of religious freedom. He also accused Mr. Poilievre of holding double talk on the Quebec law on secularism by implying in his interviews granted in Quebec that he would not intervene in a legal challenge before the highest court in the country. His attack, however, did not stick.
The race is still not over for Mr. Charest. He still has the official debates of May 11 and 25, meetings which will presumably be held in a less stormy atmosphere than that of Thursday. And his team will have until June 3 to recruit new members for the September 10 election. But time is running out. Against a candidate for whom political decorum is a foreign concept, Mr. Charest must undoubtedly begin to look forward to seeing the end of the race.