Liberals' triumph

Published : May 09, 2003 00:00 IST

Liberal Party leader Jean Charest in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on April 14, after his victory in the provincial elections. - RYAN REMIORZ/AP

Liberal Party leader Jean Charest in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on April 14, after his victory in the provincial elections. - RYAN REMIORZ/AP

The people of Quebec vote in favour of the Liberal party and its federalist leader Jean Charest, rejecting the separatist Parti Quebecois, which was in power.

"TO work for Quebec's betterment within this wonderful country, Canada," was the pivotal promise made by Quebec Liberal Party leader Jean Charest in the campaign for the provinicial elections. On April 14, in what seemed to be a resounding endorsement of that catchy slogan, the country's only predominantly French-Canadian province voted the Liberals in with 76 seats in the 125-member legislature. After the decisive victory, a jubilant Charest told cheering supporters: "It is not only Quebec that has changed tonight, but Canada."

It was a tight race. According to opinion polls, on election eve the French nationalistic Parti Quebecois (P.Q.) continued to retain its base among the province's majority Francophone voters with a slender lead of 5 per cent. Yet, an upsurge of support among the English-speaking Anglophones and minority community voters, coupled with the siphoning off of P.Q. votes by a third party, saw the Liberals sweep to power.

Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, the results were a foregone conclusion within 39 minutes of counting. P.Q. Premier Bernard Landry, with a distinguished political career spanning 33 years, was ousted. The P.Q., which had been in power since 1994, saw its tally drop from 76 in the 1998 elections to 45. Its vote share declined from 43 per cent in 1998 to 33.2 per cent. The Liberals, who won 48 seats in 1998, increased their vote share from 44 per cent to 45.8 per cent. A voter upswing favouring the Action Democratique du Quebec (ADQ), led by 32-year-old Mario Dumont, saw the party's tally rise to four seats with 18.3 per cent of the votes; the party got only one seat in 1998 with a vote share of 12 per cent.

On April 15, in a message from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, Prime Minister Jean Chretien said: "It's very good news because the government of Quebec was to separate Quebec eventually. They lost the election yesterday by a big margin, and for me, who has been fighting this problem for a long time, it was heartening".

The significance of the result is that forces espousing Quebec separatism have been routed. Despite defeats for the separatist cause in the referendums of 1980 and 1995, the P.Q. harboured hopes of holding another one if re-elected to power. During his campaign, Bernard Landry threatened to hold a third referendum if the P.Q. had "even the slightest chance of winning".

Ever since the 1995 referendum, when the "unity" forces squeaked through with 50.6 per cent votes as against 49.4 per cent polled by the "separatist" forces, the threat of another referendum has loomed large. However, the polls showed that seven out 10 people in the province did not want another plebiscite. The P.Q. was in power for a comparatively long time, but its performance was quite "jaded".

Landry's attempt at seeking a third consecutive mandate for the P.Q. on the theme "When you have a good government you don't change it," did not quite catch on. His campaign promise of a four-day week for selected sectors put off people. Charest, on the other hand, campaigned for "change within Canada". He promised a $5-billion tax relief to wage earners and offered to pump in $5 million into health and education.

More importantly, Charest spent the past five years touring the length and breadth of the province and engaging in hard work to revive the party and build up his own image. Although a native of Quebec, Charest spent his early political years in Ottawa. Charest, who is of bilingual parentage, with an English mother and French father, was elected to Parliament at the age of 26 on the Progressive Conservative Party ticket and became the youngest Minister in Canadian history, in Brian Mulroney's Cabinet, at the age of 28. He later switched parties to become the Liberal leader in Quebec.

Charest, 44, was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, on June 24, 1958. The day is significant because it is St. Jean Baptiste Day, which Quebec celebrates as a "national holiday". Although motivated by ideals of Canadian unity vis--vis Quebecoise separatism, Charest was generally regarded as an outsider in both Quebec and Liberal political circles. There was a time when the party and not its leader was considered popular. The landslide victory, therefore, is a personal triumph for Charest.

When the election campaign commenced five weeks ago, Charest was a distant third in opinion polls. Later, he moved up to the second spot. The decisive shift in his favour came after a televised debate with 66-year-old Landry. Charest's undeniable espousal of federalism has long coloured his image; initially it even made him a liability to his party. But Charest went ahead and raised the question in the debate, throwing his main rival off balance. He confronted Landry directly on the issue by citing a news report quoting comments made by former P.Q. Premier Jacques Parizeau on the subject. Put on the defensive, the P.Q. leader tried to distance himself from Parizeau. This happened at a time when Quebeckers had started shifting their attention from the war in Iraq to electoral issues. While Landry sputtered, Charest sounded conversant on policy issues, demonstrating that he had in him the stuff of premiership.

Charest's performance at the debate helped him round off nearly five years of hard work and brought him back from the wilderness of the Opposition benches. As election day approached, his image had improved so much that the party was issuing posters featuring Charest alone. From being the least-appreciated political leader in the opinion polls, Charest became Quebec's 29th Premier-designate.

The results have shown that Landry's leadership or the lack of it was the main cause for the P.Q.'s defeat. He refused to make clear to voters his stand on sovereignty, and paid dearly for the ambiguity. Voters rejected Landry's "transition" plan to try out a "confederal union" between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

Analysts say that it will take a strong leadership to restore credibility to a party that is torn between ideology and power. The P.Q., which first came to power in 1976 under Rene Levesque, continued to be in power until 1985. A Liberal renaissance under Rober Bourassa prevailed from 1985 to 1994. The P.Q. returned under Parizeau in 1994. Lucian Bouchard led it to victory again in 1998. The Liberals were then led by Charest, who had left the Conservative ranks to strengthen the anti-separatist movement in the province.

Early in 1990 Charest resigned as Secretary of State for Fitness and Amateur Sport after he allegedly phoned a Judge who was about to rule on a case involving a track-and-field coach. Soon after leaving Brian Mulroney's Cabinet, he was enlisted to lead a parliamentary committee trying to salvage the faltering Meech Lake constitutional accord. The effort was sabotaged when Lucian Bouchard, who would later become Quebec Premier, denounced the committee's final report shortly before quitting the Tories to found the separatist Bloc Quebecois. Eventually Charest made it back to the Cabinet as Environment Minister. After Mulroney's retirement, Charest contested and lost the election for Conservative leadership. He was re-elected in 1993 and was one of the two Tories to survive the party's collapse.

Charest disappeared from public view until the 1995 sovereignty referendum. As both Jean Chrtien, the Prime Minister, and Daniel Johnson, the provincial Liberal leader, proved to be uninspiring as federalist leaders, Charest was brought in to co-chair the "NO" campaign. Possibly, it was his presence that made the difference in the narrow federalist victory. It was the memory of his emotional referendum speeches that sparked a `draft-Charest' movement in 1998, when Quebec Liberal leader Johnson announced that he was stepping down. With opinion polls suggesting that a Charest-led Liberal Party could defeat Lucian Bouchard's P.Q., Charest was asked to "save Canada". He accepted the invitation, but quickly saw his popularity sag. The charismatic Bouchard led the P.Q. to another victory.

In an interview last year, Charest said: "The bottom line is, if you're in the Opposition here, it's all work and no glory. The press here has never given a very glowing treatment to the Leader of the Opposition in our tradition... Once you understand that, you just hit the road and prepare. That's what we're doing now."

He travelled to the outlying regions of Quebec, where he knew the Liberals had to make a breakthrough if they hoped to regain power. And after the ADQ surged in the polls last year on a platform of lower taxes and a smaller government, the Liberals recycled some of the proposals that had earned them scorn in 1998. They promised to "re-invent Quebec," cutting $5 billion in personal income taxes over five years and freezing spending in all areas except health and education. Five years later, Quebeckers decided they were ready for those ideas, and ready for Charest.

As the P.Q. dropped in the polls, Landry subtly attempted to question Charest's credentials as a true Quebecker. He delighted in pointing out that Charest lived in Westmount, which despite recent demographic changes was still populated by the "rich English". The P.Q. leader accused Charest of being too cozy with Ottawa after a handful of federal Liberal Members of Parliament turned up at his campaign events.

The attacks were no surprise to Charest, who in the 1997 federal elections, when he was still federal Tory leader, had to deal with a Bloc Quebecois MP's remark that his English-speaking mother had registered him as "John James Charest" on his birth certificate. During the recent campaign, he became irritated when a reporter asked him to declare whether he considered himself a Quebecker or a Canadian first. "I'm not inclined to do that. I don't think anybody should be out there trying to measure people's identity... I was born in Quebec, raised in Quebec. I've lived here all my life. I love Quebec and I worked very hard over the last five years to prepare to be Premier... I feel profoundly Quebecois, profoundly attached to Quebec. Describing me as a nationalist does not bother me," Charest said. In his victory speech, alluding to the ups and downs in his political life, Charest said: "There are difficult moments in life, but I've been privileged too."

The Liberal leader is the first unambiguous federalist to head a Quebec government in decades, a sign of the fact that sovereignty has become a dormant issue. Still, Charest faces a challenging time ahead. But, for now, he can bask in the glow of having run a first-rate election campaign that has rehabilitated his image.

Political observers say that no election has seen such a complete reversal of fortunes in such a short period. Canada's largest circulated newspaper The Toronto Star welcomed the verdict. Its editorial of April 15 said: "And all of Canada is the better for the result. For the first time in a decade Quebec will have an unapologetically federalist Premier, and the province will be spared a ruinous third referendum. Bitter as this is for Landry's aging generation of separatists, who now see scant hope of creating the `Republic of Quebec' that has been their motivating dream, it is good news for most Canadians and the majority of Quebeckers".

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