Antoine Dionne Charest was born in the corridors of power. During the last referendum on Quebec sovereignty, in 1995, he was only 7 years old. That didn’t stop him from organizing his own little No camp committee in his childhood bedroom in Gatineau. A sort of baptism of politics, which never left him again.
When we arrive at his apartment in the Côte-des-Neiges district of Montreal, Mr. Dionne Charest welcomes us from the top of his balcony, on this chilly fall morning. Facing the entrance, a few floors up, he apologizes that the dashboard for unlocking the door displays his instructions in English. He has already complained to the building manager, swears the one who describes himself as a nationalist.
It will soon be 30 years ago, when the No camp won by a few thousand votes, Antoine Dionne Charest was far too young to understand the issues for which his father Jean Charest, then leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in Ottawa, was a leading player.
But today aged 35, faced with the rise of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in the polls and the Liberals who are getting bogged down on the provincial political scene, the doctoral student in philosophy and member of the committee on the revival of the Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) wants to have a say.
Freedoms first
Member of the PLQ political commission since 2018, a sort of ideas box which offers political orientations to liberal activists, Antoine Dionne Charest has distinguished himself in recent years at party congresses. Themes that are dear to him have returned to the agenda: interculturalism, the Constitution of Quebec, but above all his attachment to individual freedoms. Ideas that took root at the heart of the committee report on the revival of the Liberal Party.
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Antoine Dionne Charest says he is proud to bear the name Charest: “I am proud of it and I am very proud of the achievements of my father’s government. Today, I give my opinion, I give the truth, and I do not hide. »
In May 2019 in Drummondville, before Dominique Anglade was crowned at the head of the party, he was already influencing the debate concerning the Law on State Secularism by declaring that: “for us, liberals, individual freedoms are non-negotiable”. Still in this same city, last October, he surprised by his verve, while journalists recognized in one of his press scrums the way of speaking and the posture of his father, who was leader of the Liberal Party of Quebec from 1998 to 2012.
To those who asked him if the Liberals were still tormented by the ghosts of the scandals which led to a commission of inquiry into the awarding and management of public contracts in the construction industry, he replied that the housekeeping had been done and it was high time for the media to change the “cassette”.
“I am proud to bear the name Charest. […] I am proud of it and I am very proud of the achievements of my father’s government. Today, I give my opinion, I give the correct time, and I do not hide,” he tells us sitting in his living room, without looking away, while serving coffee for a long interview on his journey, but above all on his ambitions.