It took a lot of imagination to think about it: some liberals today profess their longing for Jean Charest.
• Also read: Liberals are still very bored with Jean Charest
Twenty years after his election, they now want us to believe that the former Liberal Prime Minister was a great Prime Minister in his own way, with an unjustly sacrificed reputation that deserves to be rehabilitated.
It’s a fun theory.
referendum
I content myself with recalling some elementary political elements for those who wish to understand this assessment.
Jean Charest initially wanted to be Prime Minister of Canada, and realizing in the late 1990s that he would not succeed, he resorted to Quebec as a consolation prize.
When he became prime minister in April 2003, eight years after the referendum, he gave himself a mission: the reprovincialization of Quebec.
By this I mean that Quebec has asserted itself as an independent nation since the Quiet Revolution. Jean Charest’s mission was to put an end to this idea.
He also had one goal: to ensure that a referendum on independence would never again be possible. Necessary to secure Quebec’s political future demographically, it opened the floodgates to immigration.
Jean Charest saw Quebec becoming Anglicized.
At best we’ll say he left it out of indifference, at worst we can believe he wasn’t sorry. Because the less French-speaking Quebec is, the more liberal it will be. The less Francophone he is, the more Canadian he becomes.
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It will also have contributed to the distortion of the identity question at the time of the reasonable accommodation crisis, by implying that those who resisted its reproduction were participating in a climate of intolerance.
His government too will have contributed to the deterioration of democratic life if anyone remembers the Charbonneau Commission.
His government will have contributed to the collapse of Quebec, which has still not recovered.
He can say mission accomplished.
