HOUSAKOS: Charest’s track record not what Canada needs in a leader

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Last week my former colleague and Liberal appointee Andre Pratte inserted himself into our party’s leadership by inviting Conservatives to ask ourselves who is best suited to defeat the Liberals in the next election. Good question.

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In the view of Mr. Pratte, someone who you can be sure won’t be casting a ballot for any of the contenders, that person is Jean Charest. The trouble with Pratte’s argument is that it bears very little relationship to Charest’s track record. Unlike most objects that appear in the distance, Charest’s record shrinks as you draw closer.

In 1997, following his unsuccessful first attempt at becoming leader, Charest’s Progressive Conservative party failed to adequately challenge the economic record of the Jean Chrétien Liberals and finished dead last in the election. He promptly left the party, with only 50,000 members and $10 million of debt, to lead the provincial Quebec Liberals. The narrative goes that influential voices were calling him to provincial politics to save the country.

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The country didn’t need saving.

Charest lost the 1998 election to Lucien Bouchard, who never held another referendum. By 2003, Quebeckers had moved on from the separation debate when Charest’s Liberals won that year’s election on a promise to cut taxes, find savings, and fix the province’s ailing health care system.

He did neither.

By 2004, Charest had settled into an approach of higher spending, increased debt, and repeated tax hikes. From a billion dollar increase in hydroelectricity rates to the doubling of licence registration fees, increases in payroll taxes, gas taxes, daycare fees, and a carbon tax – Charest made life less affordable for working families.

His only serious tax cut in nine years was for political expediency during a tough 2008 election where he narrowly held on to his final majority. Charest used a $950 million transfer from the Harper government, intended to correct the fiscal imbalance in health care funding, for his tax cut and spent that campaign attacking Stephen Harper and renouncing his own former conservative ties.

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When the Harper government cut the GST by 2%, Charest raised the provincial sales tax by the same amount. When the 2009 recession hit, he introduced a deeply regressive $200 health tax on every single adult in the province.

By this point, he’d abandoned all pretense of fiscal conservatism.

At a time when our country is facing an affordability crisis as a result of Justin Trudeau’s mismanagement, Charest’s fiscal record deserves greater scrutiny. It is objectively worse than that of Bouchard and Philippe Couillard but also of most of his provincial counterparts. Charest was ranked 7th out of 10 premiers in a 2012 Fraser Institute study on fiscal management – quite the dubious distinction.

As is his record on ethics. Charest’s entire tenure as premier was one of scandal and allegations of corruption. Macleans magazine, in 2010, referred to Quebec as “Canada’s most corrupt province”; while the findings of the Charbonneau Commission had a profound impact on Quebeckers, leading them to abandon political parties and political fundraising on an unprecedented scale.

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The combination of financial mismanagement and scandal left Charest with a 27% approval rating in his final year in office in 2012. That year he lost to Pauline Marois’ PQ and failed to win his own seat.

In the time since leaving office in what was a resounding rebuke by voters, Mr. Charest has kept busy lobbying on behalf of the EcoFiscal Commission in favour of carbon taxing and on behalf of Huawei while the “Two Michaels” – Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor – were being held in a Chinese prison.

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In the coming weeks and months, Conservatives will be told that Charest is the moderate option who can win government and lead Canada through a time of crisis.

In reality, our party has won when it has stood for sound fiscal management, integrity in government and a foreign policy based on standing up for freedom and human rights. We should ask whether the leader who can best challenge Trudeau on deficits and inflation is one who did a worse job of managing his province’s finances than Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty did his; whether federal Liberals can be held to account on their ethics violations by a provincial Liberal whose main talking point in our leadership race will be his failure to be indicted; whether a lobbyist whose clients are controlled by the Communist Party of China can ensure our national security and defend our values abroad.

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Like many Conservatives, I will be supporting Pierre Poilievre to be our next leader. We need leadership that can speak to a new generation of Canadians who have seen their opportunities to own their own homes, start businesses and get ahead in life snatched away by the high spending, inflation, taxes and debt that are the consequences of Liberal policies like those of Charest and Trudeau. Poilievre is the leader who will forcefully challenge those policies and win with a bold vision for our country’s future, not nostalgia for the past.

— Leo Housakos is a Conservative Senator from Montreal and a National co-chair for Pierre Poilievre’s leadership campaign