So now we know why Stephen Harper didn't spend more time in this year's election campaign attacking Paul Martin for recruiting a prominent nationalist as his Quebec lieutenant: He thought it was a pretty swell idea.

Richard Decarie, expected to be named as the Conservative leader's new deputy chief of staff, is not quite Jean Lapierre. He didn't, for instance, abandon his party in the grip of a constitutional crisis to help Lucien Bouchard form the Bloc Quebecois. Nor is there any reason to believe that he remains as half-hearted about federalism as Mr. Lapierre appears to be. But he did happen to be a senior aide in Jacques Parizeau's Parti Quebecois government during the 1995 sovereignty referendum, which makes him a bit of a curious choice to help run the office of a national party leader and potential prime-minister-in-waiting.

Or perhaps not so curious at all. If each of the three major national parties agrees on something, then it's probably fair to say they've reached a consensus. And these days, the consensus seems to be that it's time to reach out to nationalists.

The Liberals have Mr. Lapierre. The Conservatives, it appears, have Mr. Decarie. And the NDP - well, we're talking about a party that pledged partway through the recent campaign to repeal the Clarity Act, so you get the idea.

It's a poorly kept secret that there's some grumbling going on behind the scenes in each of the parties about these decisions. But it's evidently falling on deaf ears.

Either Mr. Harper or Mr. Layton could have picked up votes across Canada by attacking the Lapierre appointment during the campaign. The one thing most Ontarians and Albertans can probably agree on is that they don't want a repeat of the Mulroney-era pandering to Quebec nationalists that ultimately took us from Meech Lake to Charlottetown to a very close brush with death in the 1995 sovereignty referendum -- and Mr. Martin's heavy leaning on the former Bloquiste could have been painted as a sign that we were headed for just that. But they wanted no part of it, because neither has given up on winning seats in Quebec and both have concluded that they'll need people of Mr. Lapierre's mindset to do so.

The gut reaction, at least from this corner, is that all three leaders ought to be ashamed of themselves. If he achieved nothing else in his decade in power, Jean Chretien at least managed to bring peace to the national unity file by refusing to play with nationalist fire; it seems mighty opportunistic to jeopardize that peace in the name of picking up a few extra votes in Quebec.

There is, though, a danger of being a bit McCarthyist about this. More than 49 per cent of Quebecers voted to separate in 1995; nine years later, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that some of them are capable of moving on. And if they can, then perhaps so should we - especially if refusing to allow them to participate in relevant federal political parties risks sending them back to the sovereigntist cause.

Not every former Bloquiste or Pequiste putting in his or her time with a national party, then, is necessarily a problem. But the question is who's being forced to adopt a new view of federal-provincial relations - them or their new parties?

Mr. Lapierre, for instance, may not be advocating outright sovereignty anymore - but he's still a staunch decentralist who thinks the Clarity Act should be torn up. Under him, the Liberals' Quebec wing - if not the party itself - is much more nationalist than it was this time last year. It's not that the party has moved him, in other words; it's he who has moved the party.

In the NDP's case, it's not even as though any prominent nationalists have taken centre stage. But somebody, somewhere, managed to convince Mr. Layton that the ticket to a Quebec breakthrough was in pandering to people who voted to break up the country - and again, the party has been shifted accordingly.

Few of us can claim to know Mr. Decarie's motivation for moving to Ottawa. Considering that - for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Quebec - the Conservatives are the most decentralist of the national parties, it may be that he's merely found his natural home. But the litmus test for the appropriateness of his hiring should be whether he's inspired by the prospect of advancing Mr. Harper's ideas, or whether he intends to use his new position to advance his own.

Canadians expect their political parties to defend our national interests. To bring Quebec nationalists on board to help do so is not unreasonable. But to allow them to exert undue influence on the decision-making process, from either the front lines or the back rooms, most certainly is.