The governing Liberal caucus likes to meet briefly in Quebec’s national assembly before a Wednesday question period. When I was there last week, Jean Charest was the last to arrive, surrounded by the standard-issue flying wedge of aides and factotums.
Charest bustled past the waiting scribes, wearing a wary smile. A few steps later, just before he vanished into the caucus room, he gave what I’m told is a habitual salute: “Tallyho!”
“And away we go,” his flying wedge chimed in, in English. The door closed behind them.
Jean Charest is 51 years old. He has been the premier of Quebec for 6½ years. He won back his party’s majority in the national assembly in elections a year ago after a brief spell leading modern Quebec’s first minority government, so now he has three years or so before the next election. In private conversations, he tells people he would like a fourth mandate.
His government is beset by scandal: corruption in the construction industry. The Parti Québécois opposition comes to question period every day armed with little more than the morning headlines. The headlines are all the opposition needs. They are a horror show for this government.
The PQ, along with the tragicomic remains of the Mario Dumont-less Action démocratique du Québec, want a public inquiry into the mess in construction. Every editorialist in Quebec seems to agree. Charest won’t call an inquiry. Let the police and prosecutors do their job, he said. Problem: the police union wants a public inquiry, too. So does the association of Crown prosecutors. Who doesn’t? The construction union. And Jean Charest.
It is perhaps not the strongest hand any politician has ever been dealt. Yet Charest seems unflappable. I’ve been covering him for 15 years. In Ottawa, already a political veteran, he would try to impress people with his vim, bellowing, arms waving, transforming himself, in Andrew Coyne’s classic phrase, “from moon-faced boy to enraged moon-faced boy.” Now butter wouldn’t melt on his tongue. I’m trying to figure out when Jean Charest turned into Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix.
He smiles frostily while Pauline Marois, the third leader the PQ has sent against him since 2003, bellows at him. He rises slowly, one hand in a pocket, pauses forever before answering. Police and courts can work at cleaning the system up right away, he said. His government has bills ready to pass, reforming election financing, restricting municipal authority to make contracts. Won’t the opposition help pass them faster?
A public inquiry will only waste time, he says wearily. What he means is that public inquiries grind up governments naive enough to call them. Paul Martin and the Gomery circus are one example. Another is closer to home. Robert Bourassa called a commission into construction corruption 35 years ago. Another circus. It created a generation of new political stars: Guy Chevrette, Brian Mulroney, Lucien Bouchard. Bourassa lost the next election. Charest has no interest in creating new political stars.
Soon he’ll be away, travelling for much of the Christmas legislative break. France, Russia, India. Copenhagen, Davos. “He’s living days of glory like he’d never known them before,” one of Charest’s MNAs tells me later. “He must know the names of two-thirds of the mayors of Quebec, and many school board chairmen, too. He’s much more at ease today than even four or five years ago.”
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