For the past six and a half months, Nycole Turmel has had to deal with a situation without precedent in Canadian parliamentary history.

Last May, for the first time in its history, and in the history of the CCF that preceded it, the New Democratic Party won the status of Official Opposition.

Even for an experienced leader the task of building an effective force in the House with the newly-elected group of 103 NDP MPs, so many of them rookies, would have been daunting.

Turmel had to undertake that task in the wake of the sudden death of the leader, having never even sat in the House herself.

At first, shock and sadness

The time has come for the federal New Democratic Party to loosen up and let its rookie-rich Quebec caucus learn how to be good Members of Parliament right out there in public.

Yeah, there are risks in such a course of action. But there are risks in trying to control the caucus with an iron grip worthy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well, as the last few weeks of chatter about an NDP in "disarray," culminating in the Jan. 9 defection of Lise St. Denis to the faltering Liberals, have revealed.

This just in! Senior federal Conservative cabinet minister was member of Bloc Quebecois for seven-plus years!

Well, it's not April 1, and it's in the Globe and Mail just now, so presumably the fact Prime Minister Stephen Harper's transport minister, Denis Lebel, was a member of the theoretically separatist Bloc Quebecois for more than seven years during the 1990s means the federal Conservatives are either breathtaking hypocrites or they’re incompetent buffoons who didn't do their due diligence.