By Henry Srebrnik, (Fredericton, NB) Daily Gleaner
With Andrew Scheer stepping down as Conservative Party leader following his recent election defeat, the names of many potential contenders to succeed him are being brought forward. One of them is Jean Charest.
Both of English Canada’s Toronto-based national newspapers have been beating the drums for him. In the National Post, Jackson Doughart and Chris Selley have called on Charest to enter the ring, and the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson has done likewise.
Montreal’s Le Devoir finally got Charest to comment. “The information is true that I am in the process of considering (the question),” Charest told the newspaper a few days ago.
But, while he brings many positive qualities to the table, electing him would be a mistake. I say this looking at the recent history of this fractured federation’s fault lines.
Jean Charest was a 26-year-old lawyer from Sherbrooke, Que., when first elected in 1984 as Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives came to power.
Later a cabinet minister in Mulroney’s government, Charest lost the Conservative leadership in 1993 to Kim Campbell after Mulroney stepped down but became leader of the truncated party when Campbell was defeated in the 1993 federal election.
Leader of the rump PC caucus until 1998, Charest then joined the Quebec Liberal Party and led it to victory in 2003, becoming Liberal premier of the province until 2012, when he lost to the sovereigntist Parti Québécois.
So Charest, formerly a federal Progressive Conservative and a provincial Liberal, epitomizes what many have come to call the Laurentian elites, the central Canadian economic and political rulers of the country, who are mostly located in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle.
Ibbitson himself coined the term in a 2011 article, later expanded into a book, where he defined them as “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada.
As the Laurentians presided, their worldview ruled. The lack of competition gave them ideological hegemony but has created social and political rifts outside central Canada.
This ruling class, in the period between 1987 and 1995, was responsible for almost allowing the country to be ripped apart.
Those of us old enough to remember this period, from the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords through the near-fatal Quebec Referendum, recall that it destroyed the old Progressive Conservative Party and led to the rise of the Bloc Québécois and the western-based Reform Party.
