This iconic hotel below Parliament, the scene of so many political meetings and soirées, is about as clichéd a meeting place as you can find in official Ottawa.  In a way it’s totally appropriate.
	Charest, who is vying to become leader of the federal Conservative party in a contest that ends Sept. 10, settles in front of the $24 yogurt parfait his press secretary ordered before his arrival and unbuttons the top button of his white shirt.  Before starting an interview, he chats: Where are you from?  Are you bilingual?  After the tape recorder is turned off, we pick the blueberries: Do you live nearby?  None child;
	Ever the retail politician, Charest is on a first-name basis with the waiter and treats him equally warmly.  He’s on a first-name basis with many of Canada’s political giants, too, throwing names like “Lucien” into the conversation knowing there’s no need to explain who he’s talking about.  (This is Lucien Bouchard, former premier of Quebec and a major figure in its sovereignty movement.)
	“I had to reintroduce myself in this campaign,” he says, recalling his long career in both federal and provincial politics, before a more recent 10-year stint in the private sector.  “I didn’t expect when I started that it would be a 28-year journey. I didn’t expect all the twists and turns, the events. I’ve had many moments of success and also many moments where there have been failures. And moments of joy and moments of disappointment. I’ve experienced them all.”
	He says he’s not a “choir boy” and “you don’t sit in front of a saint.”  But he is here to argue that his experience has more than prepared him to lead and, in some ways, that history can and should repeat itself.  It’s a long way from his first rodeo.
	It is not even the first time that others have persuaded Charest to run for the leadership of a party.
	In 1998, when Charest was leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives, he bowed to growing pressure from other politicians and the public to assume leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, which is separate from the federal Liberal Party.
	It was five years later, during the 2003 provincial election, when Conservative MP Alain Rayes met him for the first time.  “I lost this election because of Jean Charest,” he says in an interview in French.  He ran for the Action democratique du Québec and lost to a Liberal.  He remains convinced that this was “clear evidence” of Charest’s political wizardry.
	Charest won his party a majority government and remained prime minister for nine years.  If he reintroduced himself to voters during the federal leadership campaign, it was with a careful effort not to reintroduce them to his baggage.
	MORE: Jean Charest: A look at the conservative candidate’s key promises
	Although Charest’s approach to Quebec’s fiscal situation has been praised and the province fared better than anywhere else during the 2008-09 financial crisis, he has been plagued by unproven corruption allegations and several of his ministers have been forced to resign over allegations of conflict interests.  A lengthy investigation into alleged illegal funding in the provincial Liberal Party under his leadership only ended earlier this year without recommending any police charges.  Charest is suing the province over it.
	Although he now charges that he is out of line with the federal Conservative party, he wasn’t always a friend of former prime minister Stephen Harper.
	During a tougher campaign in the 2007 provincial election, Harper agreed to increase federal transfers in Quebec, which came at a political cost.  But Charest used some of that money to make income tax cuts, to the consternation of other prime ministers.
	Asked if it’s possible to draw a straight line from that event to Harper’s support of his opponent, Charest said any animosity is on the part of the former prime minister.  But he couldn’t resist the quip: “Now, a Conservative who’s frustrated about cutting income taxes is a novelty.”
	Marc-André Leclerc was the Conservative party’s director of political operations for Quebec during the last two years of Charest’s premiership.  “We never saw him as an ally,” he says.  “After his retirement we did not see him join the party.”  Of course, Leclerc admits, “it’s good politics to fight against Ottawa,” especially in Quebec.
	Charest left office in 2012 following mass student protests that began after his government’s move to raise tuition at Quebec universities and later introduced a bill that would impose restrictions on protests.
	Asked if he has any regrets, Charest says, “It wouldn’t be honest for someone to tell you, ‘No, I did everything exactly right.’  For one specific example, he said he would differ in his approach to labor law.
	“I think I changed seven of them in the same year and really made the unions my rivals,” he says.  “I would have done it differently.”
	There’s one anecdote that Charest likes to highlight, saying, “it tells a story about me and this tribe and who I am.”
	With popular support growing in Quebec for a policy that would target the use of religious symbols, Charest created a commission in 2007 led by philosopher Charles Taylor and historian Gérard Bouchard to examine the issue of accommodations for religious beliefs.
	The commission recommended that people in certain positions — judges, prosecutors, police and prison guards — should not wear religious clothing or symbols.  Charest didn’t bite.
	“It would have been more popular for me to do it than not do it. I said no because I just didn’t believe in it.”
	There is an intermediate line for Charest’s position today.  He says if he were premier and Quebec’s secularism law — Bill 21, which prohibits certain public servants in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols on the job — was challenged in the Supreme Court, his government would step in and argue against the limitation of Charter rights.
	Rayes, who believes the importance of Bill 21 in the Conservative leadership race is being exaggerated, was the first to approach Charest to save a federal party earlier this year.  He and others worked “very hard” to convince him, he says, and they succeeded.  He thinks the Quebecois will line up behind Charest.
	Not long after decrying how modern politicians are always chasing “shiny objects,” an implicit critique on social media, Charest is on Sparks Street, a few blocks from the Hill, looking for somewhere to buy a newspaper.  Like the hotel meeting, except perhaps for the price of the yogurt, it’s another moment that feels disconnected from time.  One might have run into Charest when he was last a member of Parliament and had the same interaction.
	Pollster Philippe Fournier says Charest is a gifted debater and a fearsome campaigner.  This has always been true.
	As a prime ministerial candidate, he may face a “hard ceiling” today in Quebec, where some voters will not forgive Charest for some of his moves as premier or even for his role in the “No” campaign against secession in the 1995 referendum ..
	But Fournier says he has “no doubt” that Charest would win the next federal election if he were to win now, an outcome he considers highly unlikely.
	“That would be a great story, when you think about it.”
	This report by The Canadian Press was first published on September 4, 2022.