Two aging former premiers -Jacques Parizeau (left) and Bernard Landry -are thorns in Pauline Marois's side.
To quell rumours that she might abandon her riding of Charlevoix northeast of Quebec City in the next general election, Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois confirmed this week that she and her husband have bought a new home there.
The couple is believed to have paid more than $500,000 for the three-storey house in a resort development on a hillside overlooking the St. Lawrence River.
Now, Marois only has to survive as leader of her party until the next general election.
The symbol of office for a PQ leader is the bull's eye that is figuratively painted on her back the moment she takes office.
Then it's only a question of time until disgruntled sovereignists take aim at the target.
And the leader isn't safe even if she has the PQ leading the Liberal Party in the polls -as it is now.
Marois is especially vulnerable now because of the confidence vote she faces in six months at the next party policy convention.
And the sniping at her back has begun, led by an old guard of elderly former politicians who refuse to stay quietly retired. Let's call it the cane mutiny.
A week ago, in another of his seemingly daily, dial-a-comment media appearances, former premier Bernard Landry, 73, questioned Marois's commitment to achieving sovereignty.
Landry regrets having resigned as PQ leader five years ago immediately after a quarter of the delegates at a party convention expressed dissatisfaction with his leadership.
This week, hard-line nationalist Yves Michaud, 80, recalled in an article in several dailies that Marois was among the members of the National Assembly who, 10 years ago, voted for an "ignoble" motion condemning him for unspecified anti-Semitic remarks.
And most damaging of all to Marois, Jacques Parizeau, 80, the cult leader of the hard-line sovereignists, launched a deliberate attack on her leadership.
Parizeau must have anticipated the result when he accepted an invitation for a Radio-Canada television interview on the 15th anniversary of the last referendum, in which, as premier, he led the sovereignist forces.
Predictably, he was asked about the present state of the sovereignty movement. Taking advantage of the opening, he pointedly praised Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe, an obvious potential candidate for the PQ leadership, while criticizing Marois without naming her.
Duceppe has been promoting sovereignty with "remarkable clarity," he said, while the current PQ leadership has only used it as "a sort of flag or baby's rattle that from time to time is shaken in front of the (party) members to keep them happy."
Parizeau might have been aware when he gave the interview that, as Le Devoir reported yesterday, a draft letter was being circulated among PQ members calling Duceppe "the most inspiring sovereignist leader at this time."
And yesterday, in an interview with Paul Arcand on Montreal radio station 98.5 fm, Parizeau refused to say whether he would vote for Marois in the leadership review at the April convention.
But the 63-year-old Duceppe is not the only potential candidate PQ members might think is available to replace Marois.
A standard-bearer for a younger generation of sovereignists is emerging in the person of 47-year-old MNA Bernard Drainville, the most prominent of the talented "young wolves" in the PQ opposition.
The ambitious Drainville, a former student leader and Radio-Canada television journalist with a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics, has been considered leadership material right from the start of his career with the PQ three years ago.
And this week, with Marois under attack, Drainville appeared to be campaigning for her job.
He stole the show at last weekend's PQ council meeting with a rousing speech on energy independence -the video of which he has posted on his website.
And a few days later, with two other MNAs, he made a grandstand play by proposing a new limit on political contributions that would be even lower than what the PQ is proposing.
Start paying attention to Bernard Drainville, because he might be a future premier of Quebec -in place of the PQ's present leader.
dmacpherson roG montrealgazette.com