Disoriented. Directionless. Distracted. Unstable.

Was that me describing the charming chap in the black SUV who almost wiped out the front of my car, cutting me off on Montreal's Highway 20 so he could get one vehicle length ahead of me in an early morning traffic jam?

Uh, no. I distinctly remember that the parts of speech I directed at him all began with F, not D. In fact, the words cited belong to Canada's Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who made headlines by using them to castigate his fellow Quebecers.

In a broadside publicized last week, the primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and archbishop of Quebec warned that the entrenchment of those traits in the province's citizens has alarming implications for their moral — and even physical — health.

Quebec's rising number of abortions and suicides and its drastic drop in marriages and births reflect a crisis of values that will put pressure on the provincial health-care system as the sickness in the body politic takes its toll on individual lives, Ouellet wrote.

His words got a large splash in the daily Journal de Montréal and were picked up in English-language media, although they were first published by the Catholic newspaper Vita e Pensiero in Milan, Italy.

But who's listening?

Sharp-edged as they were, Ouellet's words might as well have been shouted from the moon — or a car stuck in early morning traffic on Highway 20.

Quebecers, it seems, just aren't listening these days, not just to Catholic cardinals but to anyone trying to rouse them to change. Nearly 50 years after Canadians first began earnestly asking "what do Quebecers want?" the answer is apparently: a nap.

The results of the week's federal election campaign show that. Sending 50 Bloc Québécois MPs back to Ottawa to check up on a Conservative minority government is the political equivalent of hiring someone to mow the lawn and tend the shrubbery while you snooze in the hammock on the front porch.

The Bloc has no power to renew the political landscape; its members are too much the outsiders to even rearrange the furniture in the House of Commons, but they can steward Quebec's interests sufficiently to protect a dog-in-the-manger status quo.

Or as Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe said: "Without us, Harper would have had a majority."

A comment like that, in the province that seethed with political passion for a half-century, would have once been dismissed as the epitome of conservative complacency. Now, it counts as a victory speech.

Political 'torpor'

It seems like the kind of backwater sleepiness that Lucien Bouchard — founder of the Bloc, former Quebec premier and the man who took Canada to within a percentage point of breakup in 1995 — had in mind when he warned three years ago that "Quebec cannot allow itself to become the republic of the status quo."

This week marks the anniversary of the 2005 manifesto "Pour un Québec Lucide" ("For a Clear-Eyed Vision of Quebec"), in which Bouchard and other leading intellectuals — sovereigntist and federalist — publicly urged their fellow citizens to shake off the "torpor" that has befallen them.

The tone of Bouchard & Co.'s tract was remarkably similar, on the political and social side, to this week's moral wake-up call from Ouellet. Indeed, both issued almost identical warnings that demographic decline and failure to reform would have dire consequences for individual health, public health care and the health of Quebec itself.

"At the very moment when we should be radically changing the way we view ourselves, the slightest change to the way government functions, the most timid call to responsibility or the smallest change to our comfortable habits is met with … at best, indifference. [It] risks turning us into the republic of the status quo, a fossil from the 20th century," the Bouchard manifesto warned.

They are bold and stirring words from a great charismatic figure, a rousing call to arms. Yet, as far as I know, no parades or other large public celebrations are planned to mark the date of their emergence into public view.

And after a brief, distracted, directionless, disoriented debate three years ago, Bouchard's urgings were met with the kind of huge yawn that my compatriot in the black SUV emitted as he almost took off the front of my car on Highway 20. I can guarantee he wasn't listening to either an anniversary podcast of "Pour un Québec Lucide" or to Ouellet's Vita e Pensiero critique in the original Italian.

This is, after all, a province whose citizens have been called upon since the late 1950s to dream great dreams, think big thoughts, fight the fight for grand abstractions. Now they're stuck in traffic jams with the daily, practical goal of getting at least one car length ahead so they can get to work at something close to on time.

Moral uplift is wonderful. Political visions are grand. But sometimes, people just get tired. Is there really any harm in a taking a decade or so off for a little snooze?