Western Producer staff
Interim Conservative leader Jean Charest rose in the House of Commons late last month to give what must have been a very difficult speech.
For all his previous nine years in Parliament, he was a member of a majority government, rising to deputy prime minister last summer. It was a government grown arrogant and accustomed to power.
Now, he sits as one of two Conservative MPs, the screenings of a once whole-grain caucus.
“I am speaking on behalf of a political party that occupied a different place in this House before Oct. 25,” he said to some hoots of derision from the Liberal side of the chamber. “Some members may have noticed our circumstances were quite different.”
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Ottawa-area Liberal MP Eugene Bellemare couldn’t resist the temptation to rub it in just a little. He called Charest “the stand-up comic from Sherbrooke” and “the leader of absolutely nothing.”
Charest immediately complained that the comments “border on scorn” and in speeches outside the Commons, used the episode to try to win sympathy for the little guy against the big bad Liberal majority.
It is hard to take the whining seriously.
Charest was one of the more than 160 Tories who sat smugly in their seats Dec. 12, 1988, gazing across at the once-again-defeated Liberals and bragging about the “historic” second consecutive majority for Brian Mulroney.
On that first post-election Commons day when the Conservatives let it be known they would push free trade legislation through with little debate, NDP House Leader Nelson complained about their use of power.
“You must have missed the election,” one Tory shouted across the aisle.
It was their day and they wallowed in it, apparently forgetting one golden rule: Be nice to people you meet on your way up the ladder because you may encounter them again on the way down.
During the next year, Charest will be meeting many familiar faces with long memories. Still, eating crow will be least of his worries. The bigger one will be trying to save the party.
He told the Commons he will rebuild the Tories to make them “a national alternative to the governing party by the time the next election campaign comes around.”
A more realistic goal would be trying to make sure the party is around at all in 1998.
It is millions of dollars in debt, largely discredited, out of power in all but two provinces, lacking a parliamentary forum to generate publicity and facing formidable competition.
Assuming he can find money, rebuild the organization and attract new members, success will still be far from guaranteed. Tory fortunes depend as much on the performance of Reform in the West and the Maritimes, and Quebec’s decision on independence in the next two years, as it does on the performance of Charest and the rebuilders.
In the 1984-1993 period, the Tories had the power to set the agenda and define their own fate. They blew it big time.
Now, their fate really is in the hands of others.
