MONTREAL

If Stephen Harper ever woke up to find the face of Reform Party founder Preston Manning splashed on the front page of the morning papers under a headline that proclaimed his opposition to a Conservative signature policy, no one would blame the prime minister for refusing to get out of bed.

No government in its right mind wants to earn the public rebuke of its spiritual father, especially over a controversial plan that is crafted to become a major re-election plank.

It seems that with her values charter Quebec premier Pauline Marois has done just that.

After keeping his peace for a month former premier Jacques Parizeau has come out against his successor’s bid to impose a secular dress code on those who work in the public sector. At most he believes it should apply to people in actual positions of authority.

“Quebec,” he writes in an published op-ed piece, “has never before legislated anything religious out of the public space. The neutrality of the state became a fact of life over time. The result may not yet be perfect but it has been achieved without some of the crises that many other societies have had to endure.”

Parizeau’s negative take on the charter will only surprise those who think that his 1995 referendum night comment about losing to “money and the ethnic vote” define his political character.

As a minister and a premier he practiced the kind of inclusive nationalism that René Lévesque held as a central tenet of the PQ. In that spirit, he pointedly notes that the PQ with its current plan is allowing the federalist parties to claim the mantle of the protection of minorities for themselves.

Since he left politics almost 20 years ago Parizeau’s regular forays into the public debate — while they have often complicated the life of his successors — have never been of the shoot-from-the-hip variety.

Because of that and because of his enduring status as the elder statesman of the sovereignty movement, Parizeau could have weighed in on the charter from a phone booth and his take on it would still have resonated.

But his intervention — couched as it is in a nonconfrontational, pedagogical tone — was clearly designed with maximum exposure to the largest possible public in mind.

The op-ed piece was published not the brainy, sovereignist-friendly Le Devoir but in the widely circulated Quebecor tabloids. They gave Parizeau’s argument that the PQ plan goes too far front-page treatment. That contention was supported by one-on-one radio and television interviews on a string of prime time programs.

It is too early to tell whether Parizeau’s entry in the debate will result in an orderly PQ retreat from the most controversial sections of its charter or an increasingly irreparable schism within the sovereignty movement.

If Marois had wanted to avoid a public showdown with her influential predecessor she could have done so.

Parizeau telegraphed his discomfort with some of the dispositions of the values charter early on. When the Bloc Québécois kicked out Ahuntsic MP Maria Mourani for her denunciation of the imposition of a secular dress code, Parizeau’s wife — former MNA Lisette Lapointe — tweeted her outrage over the expulsion on behalf of the couple.

More than two weeks elapsed between that warning shot across the PQ bow and Thursday’s public volley. One can only presume that between now and then the lines between the government and the retired premier have been burning.

Over the same period former premier Bernard Landry, who came out in favour of the charter early on, also suggested that the bid for a secular dress code should be reconsidered.

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If Parizeau had been convinced that the PQ was going to retreat to the more consensual grounds that he advocates he likely would not have taken on Marois publicly.

But so far the only suggestion of movement on the part of the government has been in the opposite direction.

With the list of public institutions that would seek an exemption from the charter growing longer by the day, published reports suggest that Marois is now considering removing the opt-out provision that is currently part of her draft plan.

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