Parti Quebecois leadership candidate Alexandre Cloutier. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

The Parti Québécois’ leadership race — which has somehow managed to be divisive, vicious and boring, all at once — ends next week with the vote on Oct. 7.

In what has to be taken as another sign of the decline of the party René Lévesque led to power 40 years ago on a platform of political reform and the pursuit of independence, this time the PQ leadership could not find a venue in Quebec City.

The party’s 73,236 members will vote by internet and telephone and the winner will be announced Oct. 7 in Lévis, across the St. Lawrence from the capital.

Think Mississauga. Think Kanata. The party that vowed to make Quebec City the capital of a new country has been driven to the suburbs.

The PQ was forced to pick its third new leader in nine years after Pierre Karl Péladeau resigned in May, less than a year after he was chosen to lead the PQ.

The leading contender to succeed him is Alexandre Cloutier, a personable but dull lawyer educated at the University of Cambridge. He was a clerk to a Supreme Court of Canada justice and a minister in the PQ government of Pauline Marois.

Catching up to Cloutier is Jean-François Lisée, a journalist turned adviser to former PQ premiers Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard before he became a PQ minister. He’s an ‘ideas’ man who backed out of the first race when Péladeau ran, convinced that Quebecers “wanted to live their PKP moment.”

The race hasn’t attracted much attention over the summer, but Lisée has been shaking things up as the finish line approaches, playing on identity politics and claiming that Cloutier has the support of Adil Charkaoui, an Algerian Muslim once held on a security certificate for six years on suspicion of aiding possible terrorists.

Lisée’s claim was rooted in Charkaoui’s statement that he preferred Cloutier for his rejection of identity politics. Cloutier said recently that, as a result of Lisée linking him to Charkaoui, he’s received death threats.

Lisée has refused to apologize, or to admit Charkaoui was not endorsing any candidate, and the war of words between the two continues.

Martine Ouellet, natural resources minister in the Marois cabinet, is third in the race. She’s the true believer in the lineup, the one calling for another referendum once the PQ returns to power.

The economic and linguistic inequalities and tensions with Ottawa that brought Lévesque to power mean next to nothing to young Quebecers today. The economic and linguistic inequalities and tensions with Ottawa that brought Lévesque to power mean next to nothing to young Quebecers today.

Lisée points out — correctly — that 85 per cent of Quebecers don’t want a new referendum. He says he would not call one in his first mandate, but would prepare for a referendum in his second term as premier.

Cloutier, hoping to steer a middle course, says he would decide six months before the next Quebec election whether to call a referendum.

All of which is completely academic. The PQ is not in power and is still trailing the Liberals in polling by a substantial margin. By insisting on talking about a referendum that even Quebecers in favour of independence are rejecting, the PQ leadership contenders are signalling how out of touch they are.

Polls consistently show that Philippe Couillard’s gaffe-prone Quebec Liberals remain Quebecers’ first choice at 35 per cent, with the PQ and François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec splitting the opposition vote with about 25 per cent each.

A recent study by professors Valérie-Anne Mahéo of Université de Montréal and Éric Bélanger of McGill points to the PQ’s declining vote share since 1995, when Parizeau and Bouchard almost won their referendum.

Mahéo and Bélanger’s study suggests the voting pattern confirms the suspicion that the PQ was the party of the Boomer generation. They’re projecting the PQs demise by 2034 — their best-case scenario for the party.

In the 2014 election, according to the study, the Generation X and Y voters born between 1960 and 1994 supported the Liberals over the PQ. Different generations, different priorities, say Mahéo and Bélanger: The economic and linguistic inequalities and tensions with Ottawa that brought Lévesque to power mean next to nothing to young Quebecers today.

Now, one of those young Quebecers is stepping up to fill the vacuum. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the most prominent student leader of Quebec’s 2012 tuition strike, has announced plans to tour the province and hold public meetings to sound out Quebecers on ten issues.

Nadeau-Dubois says his initiative will be crowd-funded and non-partisan. His idea is to channel opposition in Quebec to shale gas development, the defunding of public schools and the Energy East pipeline into positive policy positions — to develop a new “projet de société” or ‘mission statement’ for Quebec.

Independence is one of the ten issues on Nadeau-Dubois’ plate, along with the economy, climate change, democracy and the status of Quebec’s indigenous peoples. The initiative is called “Faut qu’on se parle.” (We have to talk.)

It proposes several different approaches to independence. One suggests the debate should not be about the fear that French Quebec might disappear — the fear that animated the sovereigntist aspirations of PQ Boomers — but rather “building a society, making a country which corresponds to our collective aspirations.”

We’ve seen this movie before, of course. François Legault, a former PQ minister, did his own non-partisan tour of the province to talk about new ideas. He concluded that what Quebec needed was a new party ready to move past the stalled sovereignty debate — the CAQ, with Legault as its leader.

With the PQ in decline and unlikely to win power any time soon, it’s not so far-fetched to suppose that the Nadeau-Dubois discussions will lead him to the conclusion that Quebec needs a new pro-sovereignty party — led by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois.

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