Has Quebec become a distinctly boring society?

It has come to pass, it seems, that news media in the rest of Canada think Quebec is boring, plat. Save for the occasional "Quebec-bashing" piece in Maclean's magazine, mainstream media outside the province apparently find Quebec yawn-inducing these days, particularly its politics.

At least that would seem to be the conclusion of the fact there are no longer any full-time correspondents from any of the major Canadian newspapers in the press gallery at the National Assembly. That includes the province's major English daily, the Montreal Gazette. In early February, shortly after the huge mosque shooting story, the Gaz eliminated its last remaining full-time reporter at the Natass. The venerable rag now only dispatches a travel-weary reporter from Montreal to cover significant political events in the provincial capital.

Two weeks ago, the Globe & Mail officially put an end to nearly 60 years of being at the centre of political action in Quebec City by cleaning out the paper's office in the National Assembly's Tribune de la Presse. The Globe had not replaced veteran reporter Rheal Seguin when he retired in 2014. The paper coaxed him out of retirement temporarily to help reporters from its Montreal bureau cover the mosque attack.

Gilbert Lavoie, the sage dean of political journalists in Quebec City, noted the significance of this milestone in a sorrowful column in Le Soleil: "It's been a long time since we asked ourselves 'What does Quebec want?' in the Queen City and in Ottawa. It will henceforth belong to history to write what Quebec wanted. Slowly but surely, the rebellious child of the federation, the distinct society, is becoming a province like the others."

Tribune regulars were invited to pick over the artefacts of the abandoned Globe office. Lavoie claimed the bureau's clock so to "not forget this little moment of history in the space-time of our profession."

Le Devoir, in a piece titled: "Closing of Globe & Mail in Quebec: Symptom of disinterest for Quebec politics," brought together three veterans of the English media "Ledge" gang, as in "legislature," what Quebec's parliament was called until 1968 when it was renamed l'assemblée Nationale du Quebec.

The three, Robert Mackenzie of the Toronto Star, Anne-louise Gagnon, researcher for the Globe, and Kevin Dougherty, late of the Gazette and Canadian Press, reminisced about the heady days of the press gallery at the Natass, when English media in the Quebec capital were like foreign correspondents trying to explain a complex and inscrutable place to baffled and touchy readers in the rest of the country.

At peak, there were 39 anglo media types in the gallery; now there are six.

That was then, of course, when for about 50 years, a span that encompassed the Quiet Revolution, the FLQ spree of terrorism, the election of the Parti Quebecois, the era of the beau risque and the dangerous Meech Lake debacle, Quebec has been on the brink of provoking a rupture of the federation.

Gone are the days of the couteau à la gorge, as political scientist Léon Dion described the pressure Quebec needed to put on the rest of Canada to accommodate the province's "distinct society" aspirations. Indeed, long gone is Robert Bourassa, the premier who coined the concept during the heat of the Meech Lake meltdown.

Gone now too, off to an ambassadorship in Europe, is Dion's son Stéphane, Jean Chrétien's constitutional Mr. Fix-it and author of the Clarity Act, which set the rules for future referendums.

As benign as Quebec politics supposedly has become - ignoring the fact a PQ government was in power just two years ago - blaming the exodus of the big English papers from the Natass press gallery on a general ennui ignores larger trends at work

The Internet has devastated the print trade with waves of newspaper lay-offs seemingly announced every other week. Few national news outlets can afford to post staff in home bureaus, let alone provincial or foreign capitals. There's also the fact fewer and fewer people get their "news" from mainstream sources; then there's the more alarming fact fewer people actually follow or care about the "news," fake or otherwise

As much as anyone reads these days, perhaps one should not read too much into evolving media trends at the Natass.