Jean Charest, Premier of Quebec, is expected to face an electoral drubbing at the hands of the Parti-Quebecois and the upstart Coalition Avenir Quebec. This is all cruelly familiar to Charest. It was almost twenty years ago that a much younger but severely chastened Charest emerged from the worst electoral defeat in Canadian political history as one of two MPs flying the Progressive Conservative banner in the1993 general election. {Elsie Wayne is the other for a political junkies' Trivial Pursuit question}. Their slogan for that election is cruelly ironic: "Think twice."
The Progressive Conservative Party never recovered.
Charest was subsequently lured by the Quebec Liberals as a natural federalist champion and he duly carried the party to power where they stayed for nine odd years. However, the student protests and corruption charges coupled with the inevitable fatigue experienced by a long-standing government left Charest very vulnerable.
Charest presided over the death of one political party; it remains to be seen whether the Quebec Liberals suffer the same fate.
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