MORE SURPRISING IS THE FACT THEY ARE LESS ATTACHED TO QUEBEC.

the PQ Charter of Values targeting religious attire worn by minorities.

While voters often become more conservative with age, the authors suggest the younger generation’s positions on the issues of diversity and sovereignty reflect “more permanent societal changes.”

The popular vote for the PQ has been steadily declining over the past 20 years, sliding from 44 per cent in 1994 to 25 per cent in 2014. Its main supporters, the baby boomers, are greying.

“As Generation Y (and soon the Millennials) occupies a larger place in the electorate, and as the weight of the boomers continues to decline, we should see further decline in the PQ,” Mahéo and Bélanger conclude.

It’s a bleak diagnosis, and yet there is little sign the patient has noticed.

Four candidates are running for the leadership, but only two are considered to have a chance of winning: Cloutier and JeanFrançois Lisée. Both were ministers under Marois. Lisée has ruled out calling a referendum during a first PQ mandate if he wins the 2018 election. But this does not appear to be a deal-breaker among party members attracted by his hardline proposals to defend “Quebec identity.”

He wants to post signs in government buildings advising employees that it would be preferable if they wore no religious symbols. He has also said it may be necessary to ban face-covering burkas and niqabs in public because the garments are a symbol of inequality among the sexes and because they could be used to conceal firearms.

A CROP poll published Sept. 22 in La Presse found that Lisée stood the best chance of beating the Liberals in an election. Among PQ supporters, Cloutier and Lisée were essentially tied, with 37 per cent and 36 per cent support respectively. Ouellet was a distant third at 22 per cent and newcomer Paul St-Pierre Plamondon received five per cent.

Unusual in leadership races where the victor and losers usu- ally rally together after the vote, the PQ contenders have favoured a scorched-earth approach.

Last week, Lisée tried to portray Cloutier as soft on identity issues by tweeting that he had the support of Montreal imam Adil Charkaoui, whose mosque was attended by young Montrealers who left to fight in Syria. Cloutier angrily denied the charge, but Charkaoui did Cloutier no favours with a later video declaring him the PQ’s “most moderate voice.”

The dispute drew former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe into the fray, who told the Journal de Montréal that Lisée’s irresponsible actions disqualified him from leading the PQ.

Ouellet has repeatedly complained that party brass lined up behind Cloutier are sabotaging her campaign. As the legislature resumed sitting last week, the PQ put out an ad featuring almost all its MNAs declaring, “We are Parti Québécois.”

Ouellet was absent, and she said she had been deliberately excluded; party insiders told La Presse she had wanted to change the script to stress her commitment to independence.

In the heat of the dispute, she tweeted “I am Option Nationale,” a reference to a fringe hardline separatist party. She later deleted the tweet, claiming her account had been hacked.

The candidates have at least succeeded in drawing attention to the contest, but there is a sense that they are stuck fighting old battles while the world passes them by.

On Wednesday, two sovereigntist stars, Jean-Martin Aussant and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, announced an initiative to get Quebec back on track. They said they “are worried about the direction Quebec has taken in recent years.”

A series of public meetings this fall will yield a report that could be the founding platform of a new political party.

“Too often, we hear the same debates between the same people who make the same arguments,” the group said in a news release.

It is not a bad description of the PQ leadership race. And it could be an early sign of the “realignment in Quebec’s party system” that Mahéo and Bélanger predict is on its way.