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MONTREAL – In response to a recent New York Times op ed, two Quebec MNAs are suggesting that the Parti Quebecois’ proposed charter of values reflects a “Jefferson moment” and not a “Tea Party moment.”

Quebec cabinet ministers Bernard Drainville and Jean-François Lisée penned a letter to the editor in response to an opinion piece by Canadian journalist Martin Patriquin headlined “Quebec’s Tea Party Moment.”

WATCH HERE: Quebec responds to ‘tea party’ comparison

In his op ed, the Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s discussed how the province’s proposed Bill 60, or charter of values, targets Montreal’s Muslim community, underscores urban and rural divisions and rallies a white, Francophone voting base.

“In catering to this white, populist rural vote, the left-of-center Parti Quebecois has seemingly ventured into Tea Party territory,” he noted.

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Read the op ed here.

To answer these allegations, the Parti Quebecois ministers compared their party’s controversial charter of values to the views of former American president Thomas Jefferson.

“We’d rather say it’s living a ‘Jefferson moment,’ since the proposed legislation the writer thinks is regressive would in fact enshrine into law Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation between church and state.'”

Read the letter here.

An American Founding Father, one of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was a fervent believer in the separation of church and state.

Lisée and Drainville’s reference to a “wall of separation between church and state” refers to the wording in a letter that Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut.

Jefferson was responding to their plea that he consider religious liberty in his lawmaking, specifically “that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions.”

In Jefferson’s famous reply, he wrote:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

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After comparing their views to those of the former president, the Parti Quebecois ministers also noted that “Quebec’s independent-minded choices occasionally ruffle feathers . . . but feather-ruffling is what trend-setters do. Don’t ask the Tea Party. Ask Jefferson.”