Nycole Turmel’s flirtation with sovereignty was not a secret.
During last spring’s federal election campaign, the incumbent Liberal she easily toppled tried to exploit her separatist dalliance.
But she is no longer merely the NDP MP for Hull-Aylmer, and being a card-carrying member of the Bloc Québécois is no mere flirtation.
It is not even an affair. It is a full-fledged, long-term relationship.
If Jack Layton knew that the woman he recommended as interim leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was, until a month before running for the NDP, a member of a party bent on breaking the federation, he showed a spectacular lack of judgment.
And if Layton didn’t know, why didn’t he ask?
Given her past endorsement of Bloc Québécois candidates while leading the Public Service Alliance of Canada, it was a legitimate question.
Turmel says her membership in the Bloc — revealed in a published report this week — became known to the party when she filled out a questionnaire before accepting the nomination in her riding.
But she was vague on whether Layton knew of her party membership. This is not Bob Rae moving from the NDP to the Liberals, it is not David Emerson moving from the Liberals to the Conservatives, it is not Stephen Harper once advocating an Alberta firewall then becoming prime minister.
The Bloc is unlike any party, given its ultimate goal.
And if Turmel only turned in her Bloc party card this past January, then her relationship is still too fresh.
Even more damaging, she acknowledged this week that she was still a member of Québec Solidaire, a left-wing provincial party that also advocates sovereignty.
She has personally backed a Québec Solidaire candidate named Bill Clennett — better known in the rest of Canada as the protester who was stopped in his tracks by Jean Chrétien’s famous “Shawinigan handshake” in 1996.
She moved to end her association with Québec Solidaire only after her membership was reported in Quebec. The revelations rip the bandage from a nagging scab that has been there since Layton’s Quebec breakthrough last May.
He and his party are playing a dangerous game with its wooing of soft nationalists in Quebec.
Any federalist party must navigate the waters of sovereignty in that province, but Harper’s Conservatives were already raising questions of the past separatist dabblings of some of Layton’s Quebec rookies before The Globe and Mail reported on Turmel in its Tuesday editions.
During the campaign, Turmel said time and again that she was a federalist and said she had worked with the NDP for 20 years.
She dismissed Liberal Marcel Proulx’s charges that she supported Quebec separatism as “false, frivolous and gratuitous.”
She repeated her assertion again this week that she backed some of the Bloc’s progressive social policies, but not its goal of Quebec sovereignty.
If Layton, who is battling cancer, cannot return to the House of Commons on Sept. 19 as he has vowed, Turmel will be a gravely wounded interim opposition leader as she rises to take on Harper.
She was already an inexperienced leader.
She now appears to be a naïve leader.
Her excuse that she had merely joined the Bloc, and remained a member for almost five years, to support a friend who was an incumbent MP and not even facing a contested nomination, makes little sense. Her letter resigning her party membership makes it clear that she was doing so for personal reasons, not because of any difference over Bloc policy.
Inside Quebec, the Turmel revelation will likely cause little damage.
It is understood in that province that one can be a federalist while supporting the social policies of the Bloc.
Outside Quebec, sensibilities are far different.
The country’s unlikely opposition party has badly stubbed its toe.
If “interim” for Turmel is indeed only until Sept. 19, it can recover.
If she has to carry the party into the next session, the NDP may want to reconsider who they have at the helm.
Tim Harper is a syndicated national affairs writer for the Toronto Star.