Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe is touring Washington today and tomorrow.
Marking the 20th anniversary of the failure of the Meech Lake accord, he'll be speaking at the prestigious Woodrow Wilson and Hudson institutes. He'll also meet with officials of the State Department, intellectuals, and businesspeople to discuss diplomatic and commercial relations between the United States and Quebec in the event it becomes sovereign.
Le Devoir reports that he'll discuss with diplomats the strong possibility that a sovereignist government could win the next Quebec election.
While Duceppe is enjoying his popularity and the Bloc's enduring lead in the polls, his Parti Quebecois counterpart, Pauline Marois, faces what amounts to a direct challenge to her leadership from two former Pequiste ministers, Francois Legault and Joseph Facal.
The two are rumoured to be on the verge of creating a "groupe de reflexion" that would put aside the national question to allow right-leaning sovereignists and federalists to work together.
More worrisome for Marois is the possibility, unlikely though it is, that Legault, a former leadership rival, could turn this into a party in time for the next election.
This rumour is a challenge to Marois because it comes from two former influential PQ ministers whose message is to put sovereignty aside. It also pops up just as the PQ has been leading the polls for months with near 50 per cent support among francophones. The timing here speaks volumes.
Then on Tuesday, a Leger Marketing poll showed that this Legault-Facal rumour eats away more support from the PQ than the Liberal Party -at this moment, anyway.
If there were a party led by Legault, 30 per cent said they'd support it; 27 per cent would vote PQ with 25 per cent for the Liberals.
As for the francophone vote, it tells the real story with the PQ in a virtual tie with a virtual party at 32 per cent, leaving the Liberals far behind at 17 per cent. But since the Liberals have been stuck for months at around 20-24 per cent among francophones, how much worse could it get?
In fact, such numbers at in election would produce a three-way race in which any of them could end up forming a minority government.
Still, this is all pure speculation with Legault's "groupe de reflexion" or manifesto still in gestation. They are far from creating a bona-fide party in time for the next election.
Nevertheless, this poll is a warning bell for Marois. PQ MNA Bertrand Saint-Arnaud reacted by saying that its message was to work harder to let people know more about Marois's "competence" and that of her "team" -a surprising statement given that Marois, first elected in 1981, has been a major political figure for three decades.
But the poll was enough to feed the criticism about Marois's supposedly disappointing style of leadership and lack of visibility.
This inevitably provokes comparisons with Duceppe's style which hardly ever gets criticized -not even in the rest of the country.
Another difference is content. Last week, for instance, former La Presse reporter Gilles Toupin launched with Duceppe a book of "Entretiens" where the Bloc leader makes substantive observations on Quebec's rapport with the rest of Canada, sovereignty, globalization, immigration, resources, aboriginals and so on.
In comparison, Marois put out a book in 2008 called Quebecoise! that was mostly about her life story and journey into politics.
The rumour that Legault and Facal could shove sovereignty aside also sheds light on Marois's position described by some as "a referendum if necessary, but not necessarily a referendum."
Whether or not this absence of a clear commitment is a wise choice, her problem is that it allows some sovereignists to wonder what, then, would be the PQ's purpose in power?
It also allows those who, like Facal and Legault, doubting that there will be a third referendum in the next years, sound ready to "move on" to a more ideologically-driven vision leaning to the right. All the while, they will be keeping an eye on their old political digs to see how the PQ and Marois fare in the next election.
For Marois, this must all feel outrageously surrealistic. After all, only two weeks ago the questions being raised about leadership in Quebec were mostly about Jean Charest's, not hers.