OTTAWA — Federal Liberals haven't had much to smile about lately but they're finding alarmist reports of a Quebec revolt against Leader Stephane Dion to be downright laughable.

"It's gotta be a joke," Hull-Aylmer MP Marcel Proulx said Wednesday.

Proulx was responding to the latest report, in Le Journal de Montreal, that Dion is facing an imminent uprising in his home province. The report cited one discontented Grit, Pierre-Luc Bellerose, who claimed that he and some unnamed influential members of the party - including some MPs and a dozen Quebec riding presidents - are plotting to revoke Dion's Liberal party membership if he doesn't voluntarily step aside.

Bellerose made headlines last fall when he quit as the party's candidate in Joliette and called for Dion's resignation. He had been acclaimed only a few months earlier in the riding, which the Liberals' have never won.

Montreal MP Denis Coderre said the notion that Dion could be stripped of his membership is "totally nuts, forget about it."

Both Coderre and Proulx said they've seen no evidence that any Quebec MPs would be party to such a scheme and doubted Bellerose's claim to have a dozen riding presidents on side.

"I'll believe it when I see their names and when I see them saying that," Proulx said in an interview.

"I sincerely do not feel that there is a revolt . . . or a dump-the-leader movement. I do not feel that at all."

For his part, Dion shrugged off Bellerose's threat.

"Only one private citizen expressed his view. It is his right," he told a news organization in Nova Scotia.

Brigitte Legault, francophone vice-president of the national party, was even more dismissive.

"I don't give too much importance to that. It's like bad music, I've changed the channel," she said.

Liberals could not quite so easily dismiss Steven Pinkus, anglo vice-president of the Liberal party's Quebec wing.

Pinkus last week went public with complaints that the party's election readiness machine in Quebec is in disarray - a view that many Liberals privately concede is correct even if they disapprove of airing it in public.

That was followed by former Liberal minister Liza Frulla saying that Dion "has no instinct" for politics and that his Quebec lieutenant, Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette, is "abrasive" and "narcissistic."

That struck many Liberals as a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Frulla was prime among those Liberals who agitated against Jean Chretien, who won three consecutive majorities and steadily increased the party's seat count in Quebec. She was convinced the party would do better with Paul Martin, under whom the Liberals lost government and Frulla lost her seat.

The same applies to former MP Nick Discepola, who complained this week that he can't get anyone to respond to his offer to run again in his old riding just outside Montreal.

Some Liberals are suspicious that the recent spate of open criticism coming from Quebec may be orchestrated. They note that Bellerose, Pinkus, Frulla and Discepola all supported Michael Ignatieff, now Dion's deputy leader, during the 2006 leadership contest.

But Coderre, who co-chaired Ignatieff's leadership bid, said the critics are "lone wolves" and all former leadership rivals are devoted to helping Dion win the next election.

"In no way people should think at the (Quebec wing) that there's kind of an orchestration or a situation or putsch whatsoever. There's no such thing," Coderre said.

He appealed to Liberals who have grievances or frustrations to use the internal mechanisms for dealing with them and stop airing the party's dirty laundry in public.

"I've been in the party 25 years. Every time we stick together, we won. Every time we divide ourselves, we lost."

Former MP Don Boudria, a key Dion ally, chastised the media for blowing the recent complaints out of all proportion while ignoring worse problems besetting Conservatives in Quebec.

He pointed out that the Tories recently fired their top organizer in Quebec and turned over the operation of their campaign machine in the province to national campaign guru Doug Finley in Ottawa.

"Isn't that as serious or, I would argue, more serious?" Boudria said.

Boudria conceded that Dion and the Liberals face big challenges in Quebec, where the party holds only 12 of 75 seats and the Liberal name remains tarnished from the sponsorship scandal.

"At the same time, it needs to be kept in perspective."

Proulx said there's no way any large organization can keep everyone happy at all times.

"It's out of frustration that they're saying if we had God as a leader maybe we'd be better. Pfft. Wishful."