Canada’s federal Conservatives are having an interesting leadership contest despite a new framework that seems ingeniously designed to make selecting a party leader as soporifically boring as possible. It is absurdly long, avoids the old-style convention of platitude-fests and suspenseful, shabby backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms.

Instead, a computer will process a complicated ballot that reflects delegates’ order of preference of the candidates, followed by an antiseptic announcement of the winner. If a second ballot is required, there will likely be a charade of suspense and an hour of thumb-twiddling and coma-inducing punditry, though the machine will almost certainly have already produced the final result. The powers that be in all of the political parties would reinvigorate interest in Canada’s politics if they required a shorter campaign period ending at an old-fashioned convention.

Two of the greatest political speeches delivered in Canada in the last 60 years were Pierre Trudeau’s candidates’ address to the federal Liberal leadership convention of 1968: “Yes, we (French-Canadians) must be masters in our own house (maitres chez nous), but our house is Canada” and Claude Wagner’s address to the 1970 Quebec Liberal convention, which began: “We shall look each other in the eye and say what must be said — I am a federalist, period” (it was more dramatic in French). Endless campaigns leading to computerized print-outs like ATM emissions are helping to reduce our politics to tasteless pablum.

With that said, the principal Conservative leadership candidates have emerged clearly. Jean Charest, the youngest cabinet minister in Canadian history in the Mulroney government, a former leader of the old federal Progressive Conservatives and a three-term Liberal premier of Quebec (where the Liberals are effectively a liberal-conservative coalition, as in British Columbia), has shown himself to be experienced, amiable, witty and well-informed.

His policies are centrist and pragmatic. He is attached like a limpet to whatever policy seems to enjoy majority support, and is averse to anything that is hard to explain or can be portrayed as immoderate. If he is elevated by his party and elected prime minister, Canada would enjoy a quantum leap in the competence and good sense of its leader, with no diminution in his personal charm.

Next to Brian Mulroney, Jean Charest would be the most formidably presentable leader the federal Conservative party has had since John A. Macdonald. Thoroughly bilingual, experienced, unflaggingly moderate, he personifies the gracious and elegant tradition of French-Canadian political leaders — the school of George-Etienne Cartier, Ernest Lapointe and Daniel Johnson — though not of the stature of Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St. Laurent and Pierre Trudeau.

He would substantially raise Conservative support in Quebec and lead a government that would balance ecological and commercial interests, would inoffensively end the absurd Justin Trudeau-era obsession with gender issues and would work with Indigenous leaders to improve the lot of their people and end the present government’s national prostration of luridly exaggerated guilt. Jean Charest would be better than what we have, but probably neither innovative nor even particularly conservative.

Pierre Poilievre has emerged as an authentic and thoughtful conservative who’s devoted to reducing authoritarian interference in the lives of Canadians, lowering taxes and promoting individual choice. He is a bilingual English-Canadian with a partially francophone background, and he would be only the second altogether authentic conservative who has led his party since the retirement of George Drew in 1956. Stephen Harper was the other and Poilievre would be a considerably more affable and imaginative promoter of conservatism than Harper was.

Mr. Poilievre is firm but not inflexible and imaginative but not elastic. He would sell cutting-edge Reagan-Thatcher conservatism as a viable option, expand the moderate right, end the Conservative competition with the Liberals for the support of soft-left voters and leave the Liberals and the NDP to demarcate the border between soft and hard left.

I would support either of these men and have already expressed the reasons for my preference for Poilievre. I should add that Patrick Brown seems to me to have once again been shabbily treated by the Conservative party apparatus, but he was unlikely to place higher than third.

What has been principally missing in this campaign, especially given that Charest was premier of Quebec and Poilievre is a French-speaking Ottawa MP, is the failure of both men to comment on Quebec’s repressive Bill 96. Most readers will know that this measure will effectively deprive the English language of any official status in Quebec, even in offices of the federal government and the workplaces of federally chartered corporations, and that it decrees reduced numbers of those attending Quebec schools and junior colleges where English is the language of instruction.

In all respects, this is oppressive and profoundly offensive to the more than 75 per cent linguistic majority of this country (which provides Quebec with $13 billion in equalization payments annually). Next to the Trudeau government’s false and outrageous confession that Canada has committed genocide against Indigenous people, its complete failure to emit one muted squeak of support for the rights of the more than one million English-speaking Quebecers over Bill 96 is the greatest of its many failings.

Because the government of Quebec has had to seek a large number of francophone immigrants from Haiti, North Africa, and Lebanon, who have no interest in Quebec nationalism, in order to shore up the province’s collapsed post-Catholic birth rate, separatism doesn’t fly as it once did, but cultural oppression still has its allure.

The cowardly abdication of the federal government from criticism of this bigoted Quebec language policy, which will be a total failure anyway since even the most rabid Quebec nationalists would benefit from speaking the language of the vast majority of people on this continent north of Mexico, is not diminished by the fact that the federal Conservatives, under their former leader, cravenly abdicated with no discussion of the subject in lock-step with the Trudeau Liberals.

Both principal candidates for the Conservative leadership can legitimately aspire to raising Conservative support in Quebec and neither is going to get any nationalist votes in Quebec anyway. They could pick up almost all of Quebec’s traditionally Liberal non-francophone population if they spoke up. Charest agreed with separatist Premier Lucien Bouchard in 1999 that Quebec could secede from Canada with 50 per cent plus one vote on a fuzzy referendum question, contrary to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Clarity Act.

His silence on this issue now is unbecoming. And Mr. Poilievre, in all other respects a tribune of personal freedom, does a disservice to his campaign by not denouncing Bill 96, which goes to the heart of Canada as a free, bicultural country. Serious aspirants to be leader of the Opposition must oppose this outrage now. The whole country is waiting for them to speak boldly, where Mr. Trudeau has surrendered.

From the National Post