There's a rumour making the rounds that Jean Lapierre, the former separatist inexplicably installed as Paul Martin's Quebec lieutenant, has his eye on Jean Charest's job.

Mr. Lapierre, looking toward the Quebec Liberal leadership should Stephen Harper's Conservatives punt his current party from office, is supposedly doing what he can to make life difficult for the Premier by sabotaging relations between him and the Prime Minister's office.

Frankly, I have no idea if this is true -- nor whether provincial Liberals want anything to do with a guy who goes through political parties faster than David Kilgour. But the possibility should be shocking: If we're not careful, the non side in a referendum could be led by a serial flip-flopper who voted oui last time around, and an Alberta-first prime minister with no seats in Quebec who seems uncomfortable in Toronto, let alone la belle province.

What's really shocking, though, is that, in the current political climate, that possibility doesn't seem all that shocking at all.

Yes, Messrs. Lapierre and Harper are terrible candidates to convince Quebecers of the merits of staying in Canada. But so is virtually everyone else on the national political scene -- which is largely the reason we're facing the possibility of another referendum in the first place.

Adscam, which the Conservatives insist is the real reason sovereignty is back on the table, may be the trigger -- but a corruption scandal alone, even one involving unity efforts, isn't going to prompt a province to remove itself from confederation. Nor is nationalism on the rise, as La Presse's Andre Pratte claimed in The Globe and Mail this week, because Ottawa hasn't done a good enough job pandering to Quebec -- not when the current PM has granted the province more autonomy than his predecessor ever would have.

What has us waiting for one final "humiliation" to push sovereignty support over the edge is an utter failure of national vision from politicians of all stripes.

Instead of moving forward together, we have 10 provinces and three territories pulling apart. Since Mr. Martin came to office, the lone serious effort at setting national goals has been a daycare program that may never see the light of day. Otherwise, federal politics has become a perpetual struggle to accommodate the provinces -- not by reaching out to all at once with straightforward national initiatives, but by forcing them to compete against each other for handouts given to the ones that make the most noise.

But it's not just Mr. Martin who deserves blame. His predecessor may have billed himself as a champion of national unity, but by continuing the decentralization begun under Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien effectively neutered the federal government. Today, it's powerless to develop comprehensive social policy unless it's achieved the fantasyland scenario of having every single province on board. So the ability of the country to tackle common challenges -- be they health care, urban development or, yes, child care -- is virtually non-existent.

What's needed, desperately, is a national leader who passionately believes in Canada, and is willing to fight for it even if it means going head-to-head with various provincialists along the way. But what's most depressing of all is that there is absolutely nobody, either here or on the horizon, who fits the bill.

Mr. Harper and the hard-line strategists who surround him have long projected a cynical pessimism about the future of the country; even when he doesn't mean to, he conveys the sense that he thinks Canada is going to hell in a handbasket. Jack Layton, like other NDP leaders before him, is curiously averse to offending Quebec nationalists despite the necessity of a strong central government to implement all his proposed spending initiatives. And neither of their parties has anyone who'd favour a radically different approach waiting in the wings.

At the provincial level, the one premier who briefly appeared to put national interests ahead of provincial territorialism -- Ontario's Dalton McGuinty -- is now at war with Ottawa.

As for the federal Liberals, the prospects after Mr. Martin are dismal. Not one member of the weak field eyeing the leader's job is willing to go even as far as Mr. Chretien did in promoting the country as a whole above provincial interests.

The value of a single, charismatic champion of national unity -- someone able to sell a common vision and purpose -- cannot be underestimated. One can only hope that by the time we find that person, it won't be too late.