MONTREAL — Let it not be said that Quebecers did not have plenty of opportunities to use the ballot box to signal their determination to revisit the issue of their political future over the two decades that have passed since the closely fought 1995 referendum.

Instead, seven post-referendum federal elections and six provincial ones have resulted in ever diminishing returns for the Bloc Québécois and the Parti Québécois.

After 1995, the PQ — under four different leaders — never managed to earn a mandate strong enough to consider sounding out voters on sovereignty for a third time.

The party was in power in Quebec for almost half of the two post-referendum decades. But over that period, it won a governing majority only once, under Lucien Bouchard in 1998. And even then, the PQ came second in the popular vote.

Bouchard won 43 per cent of the vote in that election (against 45 per cent for Jean Charest’s Liberals.) These days his former party can only dream of reaching as high a level of support. When Pauline Marois formed a short-lived minority government three years ago she did so with the support of barely one in three voters.

On paper, the Bloc’s has a more enviable electoral track record than its provincial cousin, but in the big sovereigntist picture the federal party has lost the battle that mattered most to its cause.

That would be the debate over the Clarity Act. The 2000 federal election was largely fought in Quebec on Jean Chrétien’s legal response to the close call of the referendum, and at the end of it the BQ fell to second place in the popular vote for the first time in its history.

In the 2004 election the sponsorship scandal briefly raised Bloc fortunes to almost 50 per cent. But the momentum from that backlash was short-lived. In the federal elections that followed, an ever-increasing number of nationalist voters switched to federalist alternatives, breathing new life in the Conservatives, the NDP and now the Liberals in Quebec.

Looking back on two lost decades, sovereigntist activists blame Bouchard for not having been a true believer and his three successors, Bernard Landry, André Boisclair and Marois, for lacking Bouchard’s charisma.

Some will even tell you that Marois was doomed to fail because — as one of them put it in an email last weekend — she “had fear in her eyes” whenever she talked about sovereignty.

If she did I was never close enough to notice, but based on what happened to the PQ in the last Quebec election and to Gilles Duceppe last week fear might actually have been in order.

Marois lost the 2014 provincial election with 25 per cent of the vote. With just 19 per cent last week, Duceppe’s Bloc has beaten the PQ to the worst sovereigntist popular vote ever in an election.

The return of the Liberals under Justin Trudeau to a majority of Quebec seats for the first time since 1980 was widely noted on election night. But it is another feature of the 2015 federal vote in Quebec that should cause renewed consternation within sovereigntist ranks on this anniversary week.

For the first time ever, the province was the scene of a real four-way federal battle and while the Liberals came out on top, the NDP and the Conservatives both won more Quebec seats than the Bloc.

As is now par for the course in such circumstances, sovereigntist strategists were quick to assert that the Bloc’s latest lacklustre showing did not reflect the actual standing of their cause in Quebec public opinion.

And yet it is hard not to note the symmetry between the new normal in both the national assembly and the House of Commons.

Where there used to be two Quebec factions — one sovereigntist and one federalist — represented by PQ/Bloc and the Liberals, there are now four distinct parties in each legislature and federalists make up a majority in both houses.

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About 40 per cent of Quebecers continue to tell pollsters that they would support sovereignty in another referendum. But from one election to the next, more and more 1995 yes supporters stop treating the province’s political future as a ballot box issue. These days, the pro-Canada camp wins every Quebec battle just by showing up for it.