Martine Ouellet brings to mind a Beatles tune

“Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to … ” talk about Martine Ouellet.

I’m not sure why the ousted leader of the Bloc Québécois brings the Beatles’ 1967 psychedelic anthem to my mind. Probably something to do with the rest of the opening lyrics: “nothing is real …”

Since late February, francophone Québécois have been subjected to a surreal amount of media coverage of Ouellet’s fall from grace. Step by step. In slow motion. Day in day out. When there was nothing new to talk about, people speculated.

It started when seven out of the 10 Bloc Québécois members in the House of Commons resigned from their caucus, citing Ouellet’s rigid leadership and promotion of independence at the expense of real-world issues.

Ouellet was Parti Québécois MNA for Vachon until she resigned from the PQ to head the Bloc — while keeping her seat in the National Assembly. She spent half the week as an independent MNA in Quebec City and the other half attending, unelected, to Bloc business in Ottawa. She called it “trans parliamentarianism.”

It was rocky from the beginning. Ouellet, an engineer who failed twice to secure the PQ leadership, is said to have a difficult, unbending personality. Furthermore, she was not interested in defending Quebec’s interests in Ottawa,

Ouellet is leaving the Bloc Québécois but she’s not leaving politics or the headlines anytime soon.

something party founder Lucien Bouchard and his band of 54 MPs (including Bouchard) excelled at when the Bloc became her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in 1993.

Incidentally, last month, Michel Gauthier, who led the Bloc between Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe, joined Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives.

Ouellet was always a “pure et dure” on independence, pure and hard. She believes the reason francophones no longer support sovereignty is because they aren’t hearing enough about it. She wanted the Bloc to be “all sovereignty, all the time” while her MPs hoped for a wider mandate, in the tradition of Bouchard and Duceppe. The stage was set for a good fight, something we in the media love.

Considering that the Bloc held only 10 seats, that the PQ is stuck at 20 per cent in the polls, Ouellet’s fight for survival was given, as I said earlier, an insane amount of coverage in the French-language media. I even wrote a blog for the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec questioning my colleagues’ obsession with Ouellet’s travails.

Do people out there care?

Each day brought news of no interest to anyone but politicos like me and sovereignty purs et durs like her. She would hold press conferences attended by no one.

Things went from bad to worse. She lost the support of Bloc president and ex-leader of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Mario Beaulieu, a man no one could accuse of being soft on sovereignty. The seven bloquistes who had resigned announced they were forming a new federal party, Québec debout (two of them are returning home now that Ouellet is gone).

Duceppe urged Ouellet to resign. Everybody urged Ouellet to resign. She turned to the membership, hoping to find the support to soldier on. A meagre 32 per cent said “please stay.”

Following her defeat last week, she held a bizarre yet well attended press conference to accuse everybody and their uncle of treason while refusing to accept responsibility for her inability to rally the troops. She said of other sovereignist leaders: “I’m far from the worst.”

She concluded that the independence movement is sick. (Maybe people are sick of it.)

Ouellet is leaving the Bloc Québécois but she’s not leaving politics or the headlines anytime soon. She’s now running a one-woman campaign in the National Assembly to stop La Presse from becoming a not-for-profit organization in an attempt to survive the advertising crisis brought about by Google and Facebook.

As for the Bloc, while the membership dumped her, it approved her vision of “all sovereignty, all the time.” Go figure.