By Michael Carin
Dear Jean Charest, Premier of Quebec:
Circumstances are asking you to perform another great service for Canada. Your many admirers will never forget the bravura role you played during the 1995 referendum. Moreover, federalists will always owe you profound gratitude for evicting the separatists from power in Quebec City. The most important contribution you can now make is to ensure they stay evicted.
For that, you must resign. Retire from politics. And soon.
Think about it. Your popularity rating has plummeted, and the Parti Québécois is leading in the polls. If an election were held tomorrow, the separatists would form a majority government.
With a fresh face leading the Liberals, the capricious Quebec electorate will be more apt to forget the government’s record. Voters will more likely base their ballot on the critical issues of the day and visceral distaste for a potential referendum, rather than the knee-jerk impulse to “throw the bums out.”
Think too about the aftermath of a PQ victory. No one has to remind you of the effects on Quebec’s economy of each and every separatist administration. Once the Péquistes take office, capital takes flight, people and businesses suddenly look for out-of-province homes, and fewer high-value immigrants find the province an attractive place to settle.
That’s simple Economics 101.
Indeed, the experience of Quebec may be one of the best historical laboratories in which to examine the intersection between political instability and lethargic economic progress. Look what happened to the city of Montreal.
For decades, my fellow Montrealers and I have not seen a single major private-sector office building enrich our skyline. Few more accurate yardsticks exist for the health of a city’s economy than the rate of office construction. Montreal has had almost none.
It’s no secret why parking lots and patches of desolation worthy of a Third World basket case exist on sites where glass and steel towers rightfully belong. The economic tsunami that hit when the Parti Québécois was first elected in 1976 has never fully receded. Remember the wholesale exodus of head offices? The hundreds of thousands who voted with their feet? Those glass and steel towers are all in Toronto.
A couple of the most forlorn gaps in the fabric of our downtown core have sprouted weeds along the city’s flagship business street, fittingly named René-Lévesque Boulevard. These are sites that would have been developed long ago in a thriving city. For nearly two generations of Montrealers, they have instead been badges of decline, akin to a blight, a reminder that the separatist agenda demolished our city’s once-proud role as Canada’s economic powerhouse.

Premier Charest, this discussion of Montreal commercial real estate is no digression. It is completely germane to the proposal being made to you here.
Montreal’s downtown development is on the verge of a breakout. Developers have impressive plans for the very sites along René-Lévesque Boulevard I’ve just mentioned. Within a year, we may again see construction cranes in the centre of our city. And why is that?
Thanks significantly to you, a federalist party has held office in Quebec City for nine years. Accordingly a measure of stability has returned. Confidence in the economic outlook has taken hold. When we have a government in Quebec that does not crave a divorce from Canada, Montreal feels the love.
The embryonic renaissance of downtown Montreal, however, may yet be aborted. If you call a spring or fall election and the PQ takes power, watch as the developers fold their tents.
Keeping the PQ from power is of course the key imperative, but another good reason exists for you to consider resignation. This one might prove more appealing. When Robert Bourassa lost the premier’s chair in 1976 after occupying it for six years, no one would have predicted a political comeback for the pariah he had become. Yet come back he did, reclaiming the premier’s office in 1985.
Premier Charest, this is not to suggest that you’ve become a pariah, but you can imitate the career of Robert Bourassa on a grander scale.
Three or four years from now, when a federal election comes due, Stephen Harper will likely take the kind of advice being offered in this letter. As a man outstandingly adept at reading the writing on the wall, and having been Prime Minister since 2006, he will retire at the top of his game. That will leave a job vacancy at the head of your former party. Which in turn suggests a plausible road map for the rest of your career.
Resign your office. Join a Toronto law firm (or even better, a Calgary oil company!). Renew and rebrand yourself. Reintegrate yourself into the Canadian mosaic.
In 2015 you will be 57 years old, a suitable age for you to recapture a position you once held on the federal stage. The sands of time will have worked their magic, as they did during Robert Bourassa’s interregnum. With your roots in Quebec, you will be a formidable candidate to lead the Conservative party. Everybody knows that your original dream was to be prime minister of Canada. Perform the selfless act now required for both the protection of economic progress in Quebec and the preservation of national unity, and you may yet reach the PMO with the help of a grateful country.
Financial Post
Michael Carin is a former editor of Montreal Business Magazine.