Angry in the Great White North

Liberals in Quebec are fed up.  Under the leadership of Stephane Dion, many maintain that nothing has been done to get the party ready for an election:

Senior federal Liberals are publicly questioning the party's lack of election readiness in Quebec, placing the blame on Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion and his key organizers in the province.

Mr. Dion will face the criticism head-on at the end of the week when he spends two days in Montreal.

Steven Pinkus, the party's vice-president for Quebec's anglophone community, went public on the weekend in the Quebec media with recriminations against the Liberals' recruiting, fundraising and communication efforts.

“The party is hurting itself if no one is willing to step up to the plate to put together an organization strategy,” he said in an interview Monday.

Stephane Dion has dismissed, and is calling for unity:

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion dismissed criticism of the party's election readiness in Quebec on Tuesday and urged members to remain united.

“We have ... progress to make and we'll make this progress all together,” Mr. Dion said during a speech to party faithful in Fredericton.

“Instead of the fear to lose, we need the will to win,” Mr. Dion said. “This will to win will come in Quebec under Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette and president Robert Fragasso all together, and it's what the Liberals of Quebec will do all united.”

Instead of unity, Stephane Dion is going to be faced with open defiance:

The federal Liberal Party moved Tuesday to close ranks and downplay discontent within its Quebec wing, saying it is limited to a small number of individuals and not symptomatic of a greater move to dump leader Stephane Dion.

However, just as the party was moving to control the damage, it faced a new challenge from discontented members of the party's Quebec wing. A group is expected to call into question Dion's leadership in a sortie in a Montreal newspaper Wednesday.

It is not clear whether this is going to take the form of a guest editorial, a paid advertisement, or a frank and open interview as part of a news story.

But what it is, this "sortie" will be seen by the newspaper's readership, and then far beyond, as Canadians across the country read about this missive in news reports.

Assuming it is newsworthy, of course.

But then you have to think that Elizabeth Thompson would not have mentioned it at all, ahead of its publication, if she didn't have an idea of what was going to be in it.