Even a love-in for Gilles Duceppe, who spent the weekend being celebrated for his 20 years in federal politics, could not draw Lucien Bouchard back into the sovereignist fold for a few hours on Sunday.

At a Montreal gala in honour of Duceppe’s first election to Parliament in August 1990, the only sighting of the founder of the Bloc Québécois was via archive video footage.

It featured excerpts of the fiery speeches delivered by Bouchard at the time of his 1990 resignation from Brian Mulroney’s government over constitutional differences. Twenty years later, that passion was noticeably absent from a warm but noncommittal congratulatory letter Bouchard sent Duceppe over the weekend.

By definition, Duceppe’s 20-year parliamentary history is that of the Bloc and, in the recent past, that has often meant going one on one against Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in francophone Quebec.

But much of the existence of the Bloc was really spent fighting the battle for the hearts and minds of Quebecers that pit the sovereignty movement against the federal Liberals for four decades.

For veteran sovereignist warriors like former premier Jacques Parizeau or Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois, who have never spent much time in government at a time when the Conservatives were in power in Ottawa, the face of the federalist foe had until recently always been a Liberal one.

Suffice it say that, in the circumstances, the gala featured much footage of Duceppe in action on the sponsorship scandal, little of his battle against Harper to maintain federal funding for culture and none of him signing on to Stéphane Dion’s 2008 coalition pact.

In comparison to the populist fever that presided over the Bloc’s birth, this year’s anniversary was a low-key affair. The fact is that, 20 years later, no current sovereignist leader, federal or provincial, would be able to rekindle even a fraction of that popular passion.

In fact, the weekend gala coincided with the publication of a devastating poll for Quebec’s main party leaders.

Done by Angus Reid, it showed that while two-thirds of Quebecers want Premier Jean Charest to quit, more than half — including one-third of all sovereignist respondents — would also like Marois to retire.

If anything, that poll made the repetitive weekend calls for Duceppe to postpone his retirement from politics indefinitely even more heartfelt.

In the absence of a unifying figure and/or a realistic road map to achieve sovereignty, fragmentation is the biggest threat currently facing the Quebec sovereignty movement. The PQ, for one, faces erosion on the right and on the left.

When Bouchard’s name comes up these days, it is more likely to be in association with the possible advent of a new right-of-centre rainbow provincial coalition than with achieving Quebec independence.

And then there is Québec Solidaire, Quebec’s fledging left-wing party. On Sunday, its only elected member, Amir Khadir, was on hand for the Duceppe gala.

Khadir first ran in an election as a Bloc candidate in Outremont in 2000 before moving on to become a founding member of Québec Solidaire. In the 2008 Quebec election, he became the first Québec Solidaire member to win a seat in the National Assembly.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Since then, he has impressed pundits with his hard work and has become one of the province’s most popular political figures. PQ strategists prefer to dismiss Khadir’s rise to prominence as an isolated occurrence or, at worst, as a passing fad. But then that was also the conventional wisdom that attended Duceppe’s first election victory 20 years ago and he is still very much around to prove it wrong.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Read more about: