{"id":16775,"date":"2012-09-04T10:25:25","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T15:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16775"},"modified":"2012-09-04T10:25:25","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T15:25:25","slug":"paul-wells-writes-a-political-obituary-for-jean-charest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/09\/04\/paul-wells-writes-a-political-obituary-for-jean-charest\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Wells writes a political obituary for Jean Charest"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Jean Charest somehow overcomes the odds (and the most recent polls), we can just file this column<\/a> away for the next time:<\/p>\n

He\u2019s mostly been a lousy premier. His dreams of \u201cre-engineering\u201d Quebec soon went by the wayside. He spent most of his first mandate struggling to show he even understood Quebec. He stalled on important reforms\u2014he left university tuitions, for instance, frozen until 2008. He did not move to clean up party financing, and when the allegations against his own government mounted, he seemed honestly to believe it was the accusers who were the problem. He stalled until he was weak instead of moving to reform when he was strong.<\/p>\n

But he hung on, for as long as any modern Quebec premier has hung on. While he was hanging on, the constitutional debates that made Canadian public life so joyless and distracted from 1976 to, say, 2000 did not reconvene. Charest had no interest in making the argument his predecessors Robert Bourassa and Claude Ryan favoured: that Canada did not deserve to survive if its Constitution could not be amended to suit the whims of Outremont intellectuals. Montreal\u2019s economy recovered, and today the city\u2019s downtown looks better than it has in 40 years, if you survive the drive in without having half of an overpass fall on you. Nothing\u2019s perfect.<\/p>\n

On his way to defeat, he implemented important reforms in the way most reforms actually happen in the real world: under fire and in a desperate attempt to avoid further humiliation. The Charbonneau commission of inquiry into corruption in the construction agency, the belated reforms to university financing, the woefully delayed attempts to pay what it takes to have public infrastructure that doesn\u2019t crumble overhead: none of these was his bright idea, but they are in place, almost despite him, and his successors will benefit. He is Quebec\u2019s Gorbachev, a reformer despite himself, swallowed up by forces he hoped only to contain. Like Gorbachev, he will look better in hindsight than he feels while it\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n

Enoch Powell said all political lives end in failure. What matters is the word \u201cend.\u201d Public life in a democracy is so cruel that taking a long time to fail is its own kind of success.<\/p>\n

Is Charest\u2019s political life really ending? He\u2019s only 54. He once had a future in Ottawa. I cannot imagine he still does. But in his ungainly fashion he has defied imagination before. All I know is that he has been good for more surprises than almost any politician I\u2019ve covered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Jean Charest somehow overcomes the odds (and the most recent polls), we can just file this column away for the next time: He\u2019s mostly been a lousy premier. His dreams of \u201cre-engineering\u201d Quebec soon went by the wayside. He spent most of his first mandate struggling to show he even understood Quebec. He stalled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[715,188,113],"class_list":["post-16775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-constitution","tag-electionwatch","tag-quebec"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4mz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16776,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775\/revisions\/16776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}