As the Parti Quebecois slipped to third place in the National Assembly last spring, donations to the Bloc Quebecois dried up, leaving the federal sovereignist party with less than $35,000 in individual donations for the first quarter of 2007.

By comparison, the seatless Green Party collected four times as much from six times as many donors.

While the Quebec campaign had first call on sovereignist activists over the first three months of the year, it was widely assumed back then that the provincial vote would be followed by a snap federal election.

Under that scenario, francophone Quebec would have been the scene of a fierce battle between the Bloc and the Conservatives.

In the end, the Bloc was instrumental in ensuring that a federal campaign did not materialize. The party moved quickly to support Stephen Harper's March budget. In hindsight, it is easy to understand why Gilles Duceppe was in a hurry to give it its blessing.

Inasmuch as fundraising numbers are an indicator of vitality, the Bloc would have entered a spring election on life support, and, as events later demonstrated, with a distracted leader at its helm.

Money would have been the least of the party's problems.

Jean Chretien's 2003 deathbed conversion to a public financing regime for the federal parties has largely freed the Bloc from the constraints of fundraising. Based on the votes it received in the last election, the party currently collects a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar subsidy every quarter, more than it ever managed to raise on its own even in more passionate times on the unity front.

But over the long term, no subsidy can make up for the demobilization of a party's grassroots. The Bloc no longer resonates with Quebecers in the way it used to. With every passing month, its fate inspires more indifference than passion.

That disaffection largely accounts for the absence of a leadership crisis in the wake of Duceppe's clumsy tango with the PQ leadership earlier this spring. Even for militant sovereignists, the people to whom the Bloc matters most, the party remains a sideshow in the larger Quebec scheme of things.

As long as Andre Boisclair was PQ leader, Bloc strategists could argue that his missteps were ricocheting on their party's standing. But Pauline Marois's arrival has not translated into a major boost in the polls for either the PQ or the Bloc.

Support for sovereignty has continued to decline, a reality that Marois, in contrast with her immediate predecessors, is willing to acknowledge.

Last week, she said that, as premier, she would be prepared to keep a referendum on the back burner for as long as she did not sense that Quebecers wanted to revisit the issue of their political future. If that were to take 10 years, she added, so be it.

That may be fine for the PQ, a party that has increasingly concerned itself with the quest for power over the years, but it leaves the Bloc with a major crisis of relevance. Now that the House of Commons has recognized Quebec's national character, now that the prime minister has offered the provinces an enhanced fiscal deal, the party is grasping at straws at it searches for a live issue to take in the next campaign.

While Chretien's legacy will keep the Bloc financially afloat for the foreseeable future, a purposeless party can only coast for so long to a first place finish in Quebec

Chantal Hebert writes on national affairs.