Goodbye, Jean Charest

On Doors, Asses, And Exits

We have now had two things happen since I wrote about the (lack of) case for Pierre Poilievre as some currently extremely popular politician on the basis of that Abacus poll. The first was Poilievre announced he’s skipping the newly added third Conservative Leadership debate, and the second was a Mainstreet poll.

We’ll start with Mainstreet – Candice Bergen beats Trudeau by 10.7% and Pierre beats Trudeau by 12.2%. If you believe the raw numbers, I don’t really know what to say, but like, that gap isn’t insane. It’s not the 4% drop in vote share and margin from the default vote intention that happened in Abacus, but it’s certainly not implausible. It’s also not very impressive – Bergen’s an empty suit, and Poilievre has had wall to wall coverage. On average, Poilievre seems neutral, compared to a baseline Conservative – which is hardly inconsistent with the idea that the commentariat needs to stop pretending that he singularly represents the dispossessed and disenfranchised or some shit.

If you want to take Mainstreet (and Nanos, which has a more-than-negligible Tory lead) as actually meaningful data points, the real story isn’t “Poilievre destroys Trudeau”, it’s “Trudeau is deeply unpopular”. Whether that’s true or not, I really don’t care enough to argue about – Leger and Abacus say no, Mainstreet and Nanos say yes, and I’d listen to Leger, but your mileage may vary – but the idea that it’s Poilievre having some impact is hard to see. (Also, the Liberals had a 16% national lead last July per Nanos before losing the popular vote in September. Summer polls are wild.)

The one thing we know – the one thing on which Mainstreet and Abacus (and common sense, except amongst the very gullible members of the commentariat) agree on is that Jean Charest is the worst possible option for the Tories at the next election. In Abacus, he only gets 25% of the vote, and while his 35% in Mainstreet seems like a gaudy, impressive number, Pierre gets 39% of the vote. It’s the result of the obvious problem with a Charest leadership – he does no better than Poilievre with Liberals, and bleeds a fuckton of votes to the PPC. This was obvious from the moment Charest came back into public life, and it now allows us to have the real conversation that this column was always going to be about:

Goodbye and good fucking riddance, Jean Charest. You won’t be missed.

…

The thing that has made me truly nauseous about this Tory leadership campaign isn’t all the Poilievre stuff, which matters (kind of) and is toxic (kind of) and all that. What truly makes me want to break shit is this unfounded notion that Jean Charest is in some way a good, reasonable, sensible person that we are supposed to pretend would make a good Prime Minister if he were to win the next election. Charest is often mooted as a theoretical Tory leader who would be good for this country, because it would mean if he won the next election that Liberals would have lost to someone they could respect and trust, even if they don’t agree with his politics. And to that I say, according to who?

Jean Charest last ran Quebec a decade ago – a tenure in office that culminated in a culture of corruption of incredible record and even more incredible costs to the province, with Charest funneling money to friendly corporations and Liberal donors, all of which got whitewashed by the national press (except, famously, Macleans) because they didn’t want to be seen to be helping the PQ. Charest’s whole tenure in office, there was never any real argument that Charest was an actively good Premier – we just begged for him to win because we didn’t want round 3 of the Pequistes trying to divide us.

Whether it’s him letting the province grind to a halt over the 2012 student strike or the chronic underfunding of health services that helped lead to the sorts of crises in Quebec’s health and long term care systems that have been exacerbated by COVID, Charest’s legacy is the cap-and-trade system and the corruption. He was a mediocre at best Premier who played favourites and put the interests of the elites above the people.

Now, in this leadership race, it’s been more of Charest’s trademark bullshit – there’s some decent ideas around, but instead of using this campaign to talk about those issues they just keep lying about their path to victory and talking about launching a new party. Charest won’t say he’ll say in the Tory Party if he loses, because his commitment to the party is only as deep as their willingness to give him relevance. In this case, it’s not wide at all.

Charest’s campaign won’t give us any evidence of their claims that they have a path to victory because it doesn’t exist, but they keep lying about it because they think that we’re all fools. If it exists, they would be willing to start with an actual number of signed up members, instead of increasingly unhinged statements about how Poilievre wasted all his members in safe seats and how they actually have 80% of the points in Quebec.

It's all classic Charest – he’s fancy French Jeb! Bush, and he’s an out of touch fraud who wasn’t good at governing back when he was in government and now he’s just yesterday’s man wasting all of our times. Charest’s whole leadership election is underpinned by a fundamental mistruth – that he would win suburban, 2021 Liberal voters that Poilievre’s extremism can’t. It’s not true, because nobody gives a fuck about a dottering, corrupt egomaniac. The idea that Ontario would ever view Charest, who has spent the last two decades demanding more and more of our (and the broader West’s) money go to propping up an inefficient province that hates the rest of the country as their saviour is insanity. And yet, insanity that so many bought hook, line, and sinker.

Jean Charest’s leadership campaign is a metaphor for the second act of his career – a lot of vague bullshit, and nothing actually accomplished. Good riddance.