People used to grumble that he’s not really a Quebecer, that his real first name is “John,” that he was sent here by the Desmarais family to put Quebec in its place. You don’t hear so much of that anymore. True, he does seem more poised in English than French. But now he’s relaxed enough to joke about that, and to give a plausible answer: the rigid rule of Quebec City news conferences is that all the French questions come first, and then English questions. He improvises in French, then repeats himself, with the benefit of rehearsal, in English.
People also used to say he wanted to go back to federal politics. You do still hear that. The MNA who told me Charest is the most confident politician in Quebec shrugged when I asked whether Charest would stay. “I’m sure he hasn’t closed every door.”
He once had something close to a friendship with Stephen Harper. It left him with nobody to fight, and he lost his majority in the 2007 election. Then Harper went off to flirt with Dumont’s ADQ. “The Irishman in Charest didn’t take that well,” the Liberal MNA said. Now provincial and federal governments have a tense relationship, and Jean-Marc Fournier, who rode in Charest’s campaign bus a year ago as a friend and counsellor, works for Michael Ignatieff.
People don’t usually tell themselves it is unwise to cross Charest, and yet he leaves in his wake a surprising number of former allies who might have aspired to replace him. Pierre Paradis, Yves Séguin, Tom Mulcair, Philippe Couillard, Benoît Pelletier. Nothing happened to them, you understand. They just . . . fell. His remaining ministers are perfect non-entities.
The recession didn’t hit as hard in Quebec as elsewhere. Hydro-Québec is quietly empire-building in Atlantic Canada. Charest pursues an activist environmental policy so different from Harper’s as to be unrecognizable. In his new book, Jacques Parizeau sings the blues about how demoralized the separatist movement’s leaders are. In 1998, Dave Rutherford, a Calgary radio host, draped a flag around Charest’s shoulders and pleaded with him to save Canada. Maybe this is what saving Canada looks like.
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