QUEBEC CITY - An upstart Quebec pro-independence party, which hopes to dislodge the 43-year-old Parti Quebecois, has just scored a symbolic coup.
Jacques Parizeau, a PQ ex-premier who is a living legend within party ranks, will now hold extremely close ties to the newly created Option nationale.
His wife has just joined the party.
Lisette Lapointe has been an Independent in the legislature since she was among a handful of longtime members who quit the PQ five months ago.
Now she's joining the new party, which promises to make a bolder, more vigorous push for Quebec independence. It accuses the PQ of abandoning the cause in order to curry favour with moderate voters.
The move threatens to deepen a rift in the sovereignty movement. Rank-and-file Pequistes consider Parizeau a hero, a master-strategist of the sovereigntist cause, and Option Nationale will inevitably use its newest member to recruit some of them.
Parizeau was the premier who called the last Quebec independence referendum in 1995, which came within one percentage point of breaking up the country.
The new Option Nationale wants to pick up where Parizeau left off in the mid-1990s.
Led by Jean-Martin Aussant, a former vice-president at Morgan Stanley who was among the PQ defectors earlier this year, the party proposes immediately taking concrete actions toward independence.
Its recently released platform calls for Quebec to take over all of its own tax collection, introduce its own criminal laws and sign its own international treaties.
The party also believes that the PQ has been too timid in selling Quebecers on the potential benefits of independence.
Lapointe had been an active member in the PQ since its early days, has been married to Parizeau for two decades, and has twice been elected to the legislature since 2007.
