MONTREAL - The Parti Québécois has suffered many a crisis since it was created in 1968. Its latest one may well be its last. Its very existence is now on the line.
Last month's thunderous resignation from the PQ caucus of Pierre Curzi, Louise Beaudoin, Jean-Martin Aussant and Lisette Lapointe - the latter the wife of former premier Jacques Parizeau - signalled the return of the great divide that has plagued this party almost from its inception.
The Group of Four believes that being in power means, first and foremost, promoting sovereignty and preparing for a referendum. That remains Parizeau's vision. Then there are those, like party leader Pauline Marois, for whom good government comes first, with a referendum if necessary but not necessarily a referendum.
There's no mistaking that the resignations mark the political divorce, on grounds of irreconcilable differences, of these two visions.
The situation is not unlike that of 1984, when Parizeau and a few other high-profile ministers and MNAs resigned after Premier René Lévesque announced he was accepting what he called the "beau risque" - an offer made by the new prime minister, Brian Mulroney, to reopen constitutional talks to welcome Quebec back into the Canadian fold "with honour and enthusiasm" to remedy the adoption of a new constitution in 1982 against the unanimous will of the National Assembly.
But this current crisis could prove much more damaging, because it is unfolding just as the PQ enters its most vulnerable period to date.
Barely six months ago, the PQ was sitting on top of the polls. Now it has to contend with the quasi-annihilation of its federal counterpart, the Bloc Québécois, in last May's federal election, while heading into the next provincial election with some menacing competition born out of its own ranks.
On its left, Québec solidaire stands to take a share of PQ votes in the Montreal area. But a much bigger threat looms on its right from former PQ minister François Legault and former Liberal recruiter Charles Sirois - two influential businessmen now on the brink of creating a new party.
Polls have shown that a coalition of Legault's forces with the Action démocratique du Québec, under a new brand name, could hurt the front-running PQ a lot harder electorally than it would hurt the already unpopular Liberal government. According to a recent CROP-La Presse poll, the still-theoretical coalition garners 47 per cent of voter support. Not bad for a non-existent party whose main message is that sovereignty has grown irrelevant for solving any of Quebec's problems.
Not surprisingly, this is music to the ears of the Harper government and the Rest Of Canada. Among the business milieu that worries that Charest's Liberals won't recover in time for the next election, a new soft-nationalist, centre-right party also offers an appealing alternative.
What few realize is that, in effect, Legault is following in the footsteps of Lucien Bouchard. In the late 1980s and early '90s, even when he was head of the Bloc, Bouchard tried but failed to foster the creation of a new soft-nationalist provincial party to sideline Parizeau's PQ, which he viewed as too radical.
Twenty years later, that idea is now coming to fruition with Legault. That the two men have remained close since Bouchard, as premier, recruited Legault in 1998 to join his cabinet offers a telling footnote to this story.
For some observers, the popularity of the idea of a new party led by Legault is proof that Quebecers have entered a new, post-sovereignist era because they've outlived the grapes of wrath that followed the rejection of the Meech Lake accord in 1990.
Others with a more vivid imagination suggest that sovereignty is about to suffer the same fate among francophones as the Catholic church did in the 1960s.
But many keep missing the elephant in the room. That elephant is what happened after the 1995 referendum.
Though the Yes side had lost by a whisker, Bouchard, the new PQ leader and highly popular premier, surprisingly decided to put the s-word on the back burner and instead battle the province's deficit.
He also tossed aside the language issue and much of the social-democratic core of the PQ. Then he said no referendum would be held without "winning conditions," which were never created and never came.
As a result, in the years that followed, sovereignists became demobilized. The PQ government stopped promoting its own option with voters. This left the field wide open for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to launch his toughlove Plan-B approach, including the Clarity Act, with its one message geared directly at Quebecers: the next time there's a referendum, things will get chaotic.
Even after Bouchard resigned in 2001, the ambiguity in the PQ's message on sovereignty was carried on by his successors.
So today, while support for the Yes side hovers around 40 per cent, polls have shown that a growing number of Quebecers who think it's "doable" have also become convinced that it will never be achieved.
This in turn has laid the groundwork for Legault's message to catch on. Timing being of the essence in politics, Legault can also now capitalize on the PQ's woes, the continued high level of dissatisfaction toward the Liberals, and a volatile electorate desperately looking for change, as well as the exceptional visibility he's been getting in the media. (Even The Economist took notice of the Legault-Sirois duo, with a recent article headlined "The irrelevance of separatism.")
For the next election, this paints the picture of a francophone electorate more divided than ever having to choose between an unprecedented number of major-party options.
For Marois and the PQ - already shaken by the resignation of Aussant, Lapointe, Beaudoin and Curzi (who promise to stay vocal and keep a high profile as independent MNAs), as well as that of MNA Benoit Charette, who is rumoured to be close to Legault - this is a potential disaster in the making. Which raises the question: should the PQ take a major hit in the next election, what would the effect be on the idea of sovereignty?
If that happens, there surely will be PQ spin doctors who'll say all will be salvaged in due time. Federalists, meanwhile, will pronounce the patient dead.
In the meantime, what is going unnoticed is that something is already hovering on the horizon. For one thing, in reaction to the PQ's troubles and continued ambiguity, the word "independence" is making a comeback.
Respected older intellectuals, along with some younger Quebecers and new think tanks such as Cap sur l'indépendance, are discussing various means to promote independence in a more positive way, as well as ways of achieving it democratically other than by referendum.
Among the former PQ MNAs, Curzi - the most popular of the renegades - is also busy carving out a niche calling for the creation of a new coalition of sovereignists. Some see him as its future leader.
Meanwhile, Jean-Martin Aussant, a brilliant economist dubbed the "young Parizeau," is also seen as potential leadership material, perhaps even for a new proindependence party.
So there is some movement out there. In the short term, though, all will depend on the results of the next election.
But in the longer term, a more profound phenomenon is bound to be much more defining for Quebec. And it runs a lot deeper than the warning issued by former Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, who said that within a few centuries, francophones face a kind of assimilation similar to what happened in Louisiana if Quebec doesn't become a separate country.
The real danger lies in a larger trend - one that's already in the making and that was confirmed by the last federal election. That is the slow but growing marginalization of Quebec within Canada on all fronts - political, cultural, economic, linguistic and demographic.
Canada has ceased defining itself along the central-Canadian axis, where the "Quebec question" dominated provincial-federal politics for decades while Ontario drove the country's economy. It has now moved on to a new axis: that of Ontario and the West.
What effect over the next years and decades this will have on Quebecers, and how this will reshape their various expressions of nationalism - including the idea of independence - is bound to become the real issue.
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Josée Legault is a political scientist and the national affairs columnist for Voir magazine (voir.ca), where she also has a blog. Twitter: @joseelegault.