Financial Post
for April 3, 1998

I mean wow! Wasn't that a surprise Jean Charest sprang on us? I haven't been so excited since I sat on a wasps' nest at Grantham's Landing when I was four! Wasn't it super watching entire country on the edge of their seats during that agonizing fortnight of decision. Will he? Won't he? Who says that Canadian politics is dead?

Now the messiah is come. We can only patiently watch as our salvation unfolds.

One of my host of bad habits includes asking stupid questions. Indulge me a few.

Mr Charest avoids me like the plague when he's in Vancouver because, his acolytes tell me, he doesn't like my questions. Especially about his views on "two founding nations", "distinct society", a veto for Quebec and stuff like that. Seems that until his recent Damascus conversion to Liberalism he wanted to revive the Tory Party in B.C. and my questions were seen as being not in the right spirit - unhelpful you might say.

Mr Charest has a bit of a credibility problem here, you see. He's remembered best for the "Charest Charade", a committee which, when it came to Vancouver to hear presentations about the Charlottetown Accord, would only listen to hand-picked supporters.

I suppose Mr Charest's credibility in Lotusland doesn't really matter though for it's the Quebec version of the national unity problem we must all concentrate on. Settle things in La Belle Province and then we'll take a look at what trivialities seem to be troubling the tiresome rebels of the Rain Forest who don't understand that as always and forever more it's the great Upper Canada/Lower Canada Debate we must settle.

OK. So we're expected to sit on the sidelines and cheer. May we please have a program so we can follow events? A few answers to pretty basic questions?

Mr Charest has called upon the Premiers for help. What help, may I ask?

He can't get 'Distinct Society" (or Roy Romanow's latest synonym exhumed from Roget's Thesaurus) or a veto, or other special goodies not because the Premiers aren't willing (some may be) but because many of them can't make constitutional deals without holding a referendum.

Does he perhaps want the premiers to pretend {italics} that they might agree to these promises at least until he beats Mr Bouchard?

Given that Lucien Bouchard may have something to say about the issues and is certain to raise things like "distinct society", a veto etc, doesn't the question boil down to this - how can Jean Charest beat Lucien Bouchard without making promises that Alberta and British Columbia, to name two, won't redeem?

Is the plan to simply urge other premiers to keep their mouths shut - which they'll probably do so as not to rain on the parade to victory - then after winning, Mr Charest demands that his promises be kept otherwise {bold italics} the breakup of Canada will be B.C.'s and Alberta's fault?

Let's look at all this a different way. What if Canadians lowered their expectations of Mr Charest and treated this as an exercise in buying time, something the country has been doing since the Quiet Revolution? To do this, of course, raises another stupid question. How do we use that time?

It's true that currently there's little appetite for another Referendum in Quebec. But assuming that Jacques Parizeau was right when he said that this was like going to the dentist - there'll always be another time you get your teeth drilled - what do we do, in the calm we buy, to prepare for the next storm?

If we continue trying to ride two horses going in opposite directions, "two founding nations" and "equality", the next storm will be worse than the last ones and storms will continue in ever increasing velocity until we're finally shipwrecked.

Is there no better route to take? Hard as this pill is to swallow for the Great Central Canadian Establishment (whose calamitous policies culminating in the Meech Lake/Charlottetown got us into this mess), why not look at what the Reform Party has been saying about restructuring the country and the division of powers and see if that leads somewhere better than a postponed but even more bitter referendum five years or so down the road?

But I guess that's just another stupid question from a devoted Canadian whose sin is seeing the country through the prism of juridically equal provinces, not the myth of "Two Founding Nations."