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Leading up to today's election, Quebec sovereigntists have completed a 180-degree turn in the way they orient themselves to the rest of Canada.

Between Meech Lake in 1987 and the Quebec referendum of 1995, sovereigntists made their case for secession, or at the very least, greater autonomy, speaking of Quebec's need to protect its uniqueness, which they mainly identified with its linguistic culture and civil-law tradition governing marriage, divorce, adoption and other private matters.

To further underscore Quebec's putative alienation, sovereigntists of that vintage also claimed that on a broad range of social and economic questions - from public investment to daycare to the environment - Quebeckers exhibit, as social scientists Daniel Béland and André Lecours once put it, "a different ethos from the rest of Canada ... more egalitarian and collectivist."

Prereferendum, then, sovereigntists located the matter of how to handle the province's unique cultural and legal values on a spectrum from autonomist to centralist, with Quebeckers taking a strongly autonomist position: one that would protect Quebec from interference by central institutions such as Parliament and the Supreme Court. They located social and economic policy on a spectrum from left to right, with Quebeckers taking a markedly leftist position.

Postreferendum, though, an exchange of emphasis has occurred. Social and economic policy - health care, training, even Kyoto - are no longer, for sovereigntists, a matter of left versus right (Quebec public opinion displays both tendencies) but of autonomy versus centralization.

Now, as we have seen in recent weeks, the matters of cultural and legal values have emerged on a left-right spectrum, with Quebeckers taking left-leaning umbrage at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's proposals to decrease funding for the arts and increase criminal penalties for minors.

Whatever their ultimate influence on the election might be - the Tories have benefited in Quebec from their decentralized approach to social and economic matters but stumbled on their conservative approach to cultural and legal issues - these dynamics have important consequences for Quebec-Canada relations. To the extent that social and economic differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada are no longer seen as disputes between leftist and rightist visions of a good society but between autonomist and centralist approaches to government, then any Canada-Quebec differences will have less to do with fundamental values than bureaucratic mechanisms.

Such disagreements ill befit themselves to the passionate alienation that can fuel a secessionist movement. As sovereigntists have discovered, it's never going to be easy to whip up nationalist fervour over how manpower training responsibilities should devolve to the province.

As for Quebec's unique cultural and legal values, when sovereigntists of the late 20th century cited them as justification for a more autonomous Quebec, they had in mind public culture, the historic national culture of French Quebeckers, and private law, the Quebec Civil Code that governs familial relations, much of it focusing on society's obligations to minors.

What Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe has recently capitalized on, by contrast, is Quebec's comparatively leftist posture toward private culture - the cultural arena occupied by independent artists - and public law, law governing criminal behaviour and focused, in particular, on penalties for minors.

Whether one agrees with Mr. Duceppe, anybody who hopes to diminish stresses on Canadian unity should welcome this shift of focus. The old focus centred on issues - public culture embracing language and history, and private law concerning family values - that directly embrace all Quebeckers, and certainly all French Quebeckers. They are issues on which a nationalist movement could reasonably be premised.

But we hear little from sovereigntists about them any more, because they sit uneasily with Quebec's growing pluralism and ethnic diversity. The new focus, which seems to have breathed such life into the Bloc, centres on artists of the private realm and violators of public law. These are not, finally, matters to shatter a federation.

Whatever impact these dynamics have for the Bloc's prospects today, they complete a decade in which sovereigntists have fundamentally shifted their focus in a way less likely to lead to their goals. And that's good news for Canada.

Andrew Stark is professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto and a former policy adviser in Brian Mulroney's PMO.