It takes a lot to shake the blind faith of Quebec Liberals in their party's leadership, especially when it is in power. And apparently, Jean Charest has what it takes.
The weekend policy convention of the QLP in Quebec City hardly resembled one of the Parti Québécois's regular internal bloodbaths.
Still, it was the occasion for what had reduced itself to a fundraising zombie cult to suddenly show signs of brain activity, rise up against its masters and start acting like a real Quebec political party.
There was internal democracy, and the best policy debates in the QLP in years.
On Sunday, there was even the QLP equivalent of a party revolt, when the plenary session forced the leadership to withdraw two resolutions it had proposed.
It wasn't the Arab Spring, but for a day at least, it was a Quebec Liberal Autumn.
The resolutions, intended to counter the growing threat from the new populist party François Legault is expected to launch Nov. 14, stole two proposals from Legault's education program.
One of them, to weaken the school boards by reducing their powers and budgets, had already been announced as government policy by Education Minister Line Beauchamp only the day before the convention. And it was withdrawn by a vote, of 316 to 266, which amounted to a public rebuke of the minister.
It's almost unheard of for a QLP convention to defy the wishes of one of the party's ministers (who in this case is also the deputy premier). And the defiance was led by anglophones, who in the QLP are almost never heard from.
They explained the significance of the English school boards as the only public institution controlled by the anglophone community.
There was no open challenge to Charest himself at the convention, where he received the usual prolonged, cheering ovations every time he entered the plenary room or mounted or dismounted the speakers' platform.
There was no leadership confidence vote, as there was for Pauline Marois at the PQ convention last April; the Liberal constitution calls for one only when the party does not have a majority in the National Assembly.
But while Quebec Liberals may speak no evil of their leaders - at least until they lose an election - they can read, and they can hear.
And what they had been reading and hearing the Friday the convention opened - about the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Charest's construction inquiry "contraption" - had them worried.
In a Léger Marketing-QMI poll, 79 per cent of Quebecers said they didn't trust Charest when he said he wanted to get to the bottom of allegations on alleged corruption in the construction industry.
The Quebec Bar said it couldn't support the inquiry "in its present form."And judges were reported to be furious that the government was using one of them, France Charbonneau, for political purposes as the head of a powerless inquiry.
Just how much tension there was among the delegates became apparent during Charest's opening speech on Friday.
When he dramatically announced that Charbonneau could get the power to subpoena witnesses to testify, addressing the most important criticism of the inquiry, the delegates immediately realized the significance and burst into cheers.
That is, it sounded like cheering, but it felt as though all 2,500 delegates had exhaled at once in relief.
But if the delegates had been worried about Charest, his announcement showed that he had been worried about them, too. By making the announcement in a speech as leader of his party at a partisan event, Charest risked politicizing the inquiry even further. But apparently he felt that he couldn't risk an outbreak of open dissension at the convention if he waited until it was over.
Throughout the convention, there were signs that the Liberal leadership was worried about the morale of its support base - and anglophones in particular.
In Charest's opening speech, he spoke more than he usually does about belonging to Canada as a value that distinguishes the party from its rivals.
While he and his party usually take their anglophone support for granted, at this convention there were more passages in English than usual in his and other speeches from the platform.
In a ceremony Saturday, the party's award recognizing a longtime Liberal volunteer was given to its outgoing English-speaking vice-president, Robert Dobie, a former English-rights activist.
After the school-board resolution was withdrawn on Sunday, the chairman of the party's policy commission, which had sponsored it, said a modified version would be brought back at a future meeting of the party's governing council. But Charest, seemingly wary of the resolution becoming an issue in the Englishspeaking community, gave assurances in his closing speech in English as well as French that there would be a "reflection" on the role of the school boards first.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Liberal government will enter the fourth year of its current term in December, and the party held in-camera campaign-preparation workshops for delegates during the convention.
A Léger Marketing-Gazette poll last week suggested that Legault's new party would enjoy a comfortable lead in overall popularity - and make inroads among non-francophones, taking 24 per cent of the vote there.
And in his speeches to the convention, Charest sounded as though he was less worried about Marois, the leader of the official opposition, than about Legault, the head of a party that does not yet exist.
But his party did not seem entirely confident in the judgment of its own leaders.