MONTREAL — Looking in the end-of-year rearview mirror it is a road not taken that catches the eye.

In the big picture of Canadian politics Quebec’s spring election was the watershed episode of an eventful 2014.

By banishing the Parti Québécois to opposition after less than two years in power, Quebecers postponed a possible appointment with a third referendum indefinitely.

It is far from clear that it will ever be rescheduled.

The PQ’s election loss was the latest in a string of sovereigntist defeats that stretches back to the 1995 referendum almost 20 years ago.

The party has had four leaders since that suspenseful night but only one — Lucien Bouchard — was handed a majority mandate and he still ran second in the popular vote. That victory goes back to the late ’90s.

Since then the PQ has had to contend with more competition on the right and the left. It can no longer count on cyclical change to eventually return it to government.

At every turn since 1995, sovereigntist strategists have come up with reasons to explain their defeat other than the determination of a majority of Quebecers to not revisit the issue of their political future.

The 2014 debacle was no exception. Pauline Marois has now joined André Boisclair, Bernard Landry and Bouchard in the gallery of leaders whose salesmanship has been found wanting.

The polling numbers tell a different story. They suggest that the PQ is asking its leaders to sell typewriters to a wired public.

According to a year-end Leger Marketing poll published by Le Devoir, the PQ — even with its latest star, media tycoon Pierre Karl Péladeau, in the leadership window — is now the political vehicle of choice of Quebec’s aging baby-boomers. The over-55 cohort is also the most supportive of sovereignty.

While Philippe Couillard’s Liberal government has generated much discontent since its election, it is the government’s across-the-board cutbacks not its federalist creed that is ruffling feathers.

The sovereignty debate has been a constant in Canadian political life for more than four decades. From the ’60s on, the so-called unity issue has defined the mandate of each of Stephen Harper’s predecessors.

Harper rightly dreaded the advent of a majority PQ government last spring. Had that happened the focus of the national conversation might have taken a turn for the worse for the ruling Conservatives. They don’t have much of an audience in Quebec.

But there may be more than the federal dodging of a Quebec bullet in the federalist outcome of this provincial election. It could be the latest manifestation of an ongoing tectonic shift in the federation’s dynamics.

Premier Couillard apparently thinks so.

For decades, every Quebec government has run the province as if a referendum was just around the corner.

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Federalist and sovereigntist premiers alike have invested serious amounts of money and energy into extending Quebec’s reach into areas that other provinces were often content to leave to the federal government.

In the name of Quebec setting its own course, the province has routinely kept its distance from the rest of the federation, regardless of whether the Liberals or the PQ was in power.

But Couillard has so far taken a different tack. He is not about to dismantle the Quebec pension plan or the language law and Quebecers will likely be filing two separate income tax returns for the foreseeable future, but his template is clearly different from that of his predecessors.

On his watch Quebec is less autonomist and less confrontational in its dealings with the federal government than Ontario.

The parties that run the two Central Canada provinces may share the same Liberal label but the similarities stop there, for Couillard heads a more fundamentally conservative government than the former federal Tory leader who was his predecessor.

It has been said that modern Quebec has never had as unapologetic a federalist premier as Couillard. But then he has so far not had to worry about a sovereigntist opponent breathing down his neck.

But will that last or is the rookie Quebec premier living dangerously? Is his federalist government recklessly pushing its luck and, in the process, risking a backlash that could give sovereignty the breath of life it so desperately needs?

For the record, it was not so long ago that the same questions were asked about Harper and the potentially negative impact of his Conservative agenda on the Quebec/Canada relationship.

And yet over the tenure of the prime minister’s deeply unpopular government, Quebecers have ushered out the Bloc Québécois, kicked the PQ out of office at the first hint of serious referendum musings and tuned out much of the sovereigntist rhetoric.

All of which is to say that the Quebec premier may well — with his austerity regimen — be courting a tsunami of social unrest but that, in light of Harper’s experience, it is unlikely to reflect positively on sovereignty.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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