OTTAWA - When Jean Charest arrives in Ottawa next week for a festive reunion with old friends, he will surely receive back-slapping congratulations on his remarkable political comeback.

But amid the cheerful chatter and clinking glasses in the French bistro near Parliament Hill, Conservative chums in the Ottawa crowd might want to ask the Quebec premier for advice about making minority government work.

There are stark contrasts between Charest's minority government in Quebec City and Stephen Harper's in Ottawa. It might come down to the difference between the olive-branch and the wedge. The atmosphere in Quebec is collaborative; few would describe the environment in Ottawa as anything but toxic.

Charest frequently touts his parliament as a place of cohabitation, where the government and opposition work together to write the budget and keep committees running.

Partisan bickering has paralyzing parliamentary committees in Ottawa for months. The government has battled bitterly with Elections Canada, the nuclear-safety body, the Senate, two provincial governments, the information and privacy commissioners, senior military brass, and large swaths of the federal bureaucracy.

Rather than shy away from the brawling, Conservative party officials use their brawls with official Ottawa as red meat to enraged supporters in wildly successful fundraising drives.

But an old friend of Charest's who sits in the federal Parliament wishes it looked a little more like Quebec City.

"It's obvious: Charest's style is paying dividends," said Lowell Murray, a Progressive Conservative senator who became a cabinet minister on the same day in 1986 as a 28-year-old Charest.

"The (federal) government is now paying a fairly high price for its confrontational attitude. Charest is able to govern as freely as Harper - and at the same time he's making gains in public opinion.

"The consensus he's developing in the assembly is also developing in the province, and it's to his advantage."

Charest will be in Ottawa next Wednesday to deliver a speech at the Public Policy Forum on his oft-stated dream of a Canada-Europe free trade deal.

The head of the policy forum, Charest's former campaign manager Jodi White, has invited some of his old friends from his days in federal politics to a multi-themed party.

Charest turns 50 next month. This year marks the 15th anniversary of his leadership of the Progressive Conservatives, the 10th anniversary of his departure for provincial politics, and his fifth anniversary as premier.

The festivities will be ringing one year after many were planning Charest's political funeral.

He had just suffered the humiliation of losing his majority government, at least two of his ministers had taken to defying him in public, and his personal popularity numbers were in the teens.

"The question journalists were asking him wasn't, 'Will you quit politics?'," one of his aides recalled. "They were asking, 'When will you quit politics?"'

They've stopped asking.

In fact, the question now on people's lips is whether Charest could be the first Quebec premier since Maurice Duplessis half a century ago to win a third consecutive term.

Recent surveys gave his Liberals near-historic satisfaction ratings, a nine-point lead over the Parti Quebecois, and a staggering 21-point lead over an Action democratique du Quebec party that almost swept them from power last year.

There are a variety of factors for Charest's implausible political resurrection: the opposition is weak, he's made the economy the centrepiece of his agenda, he's reinvigorated his office staff, and he's scurried away from anything controversial to embrace populist measures like banning junk food in schools.

Harper also draws benefit from a weak opposition. The prime minister has made the economy priority No. 1, and he's been courting the Tim Horton's crowd with populist tax policies and crime legislation.

Why, then, do recent surveys show the federal Tories stuck around or below their support level from the last election campaign, and struggling in particular with female voters?

A simple glance at group photographs of the federal and provincial cabinet might offer one clue.

Women comprise exactly half of Charest's cabinet. In Ottawa, five of the 27 ministers are women.

None of those women occupy the most powerful roles in Harper's cabinet such as finance, foreign affairs and defence. Charest's finance minister and deputy premier are both women.

An aide to Charest proudly describes their influence on the rest of government.

"We're the first government in North America to reach gender equality in cabinet," he said. "And it is true that women do politics differently."

For example, Finance Minister Monique Jerome-Forget met repeatedly with her opposition critics before tabling this year's provincial budget.

She gave them an honest assessment of how much fiscal room she had to play with, encouraged them to tailor their wish list to it, and in the end the ADQ was able to support the budget and take credit for measures it contained to help families. This came one year after the ADQ was raked over the coals by pundits for threatening to topple the government on its first budget.

The less caustic tone in parliament is only one reason for Charest's rebound, Liberal insiders say.

They credit his decision to bring in two new advisers.

One is his new chief of staff Daniel Gagnier - a former high-ranking federal civil servant, top aide to ex-Ontario premier David Peterson, and recently a senior executive at Alcan.

He is credited with bringing focus and discipline to an office that seemed to spend its entire first term digging itself out of an endless series of controversies.

The other recent hire is senior adviser John Parisella, who was a top aide to Robert Bourassa - the most electorally successful Liberal premier in Quebec since the Second World War.

Charest also retooled his key messages.

The latter stages of his first term were consumed to a large extent by debates over identity politics - such as Quebec's status as a recognized nation within Canada and the reasonable accommodation of immigrants.

Those issues were not seen by middle-of-the-road nationalist voters as a Liberal strength.

The Quebec Liberals' trump card is considered economics.

The party's caucus whip says the premier came to his troops with a message last fall when his political prospects seemed bleakest. Charest laid out the roadmap for the economic announcements he has been making since then.

"When he was really, really low. . . he told us, 'Listen, I have a plan,' " Norman MacMillan said.

"He said, 'Here it is,' and he explained his plan. In the end, it was all about the economy.

"And he said, 'By Dec. 31 something's going to happen; Quebecers will understand what we're doing.'

"And it happened."

In the ensuing months, a Charest who sometimes seemed aloof and bored with his job was once again the jocular and optimistic man his friends knew in private.

An old friend of Charest's who runs an Ottawa polling firm says his data suggests people are thirsting for less combative and more collaborative politics. And he says Charest is well-suited for such an environment.

Bruce Anderson was a political ally and friend of Charest's when he led the old Progressive Conservative party.

"There's a big demand for what they're calling in the United States 'post-partisan politics' - and it's big in Canada, too," says Anderson, head of the Harris-Decima firm.

"There's a desire to have governments, to have leaders, who talk about solving problems instead of partisan differences. . .

"And there are few people in politics who are better-able to look at a cup that's nine-tenths empty and see it as one-tenth full - and believe it'll be more full soon - than Jean Charest. He's a sunny, gung-ho kind of guy."

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