MONTREAL—It’s difficult to say who’ll find the least to like in the entrails of the Supreme Court’s rejection of the appointment of federal appeals judge Marc Nadon to the country’s top bench — Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois.

For Harper it is a humiliating political setback. The rejection of a Supreme Court pick is unprecedented. It will leave a black mark on the prime minister’s otherwise solid record of judicial appointments.

The fact that three of the judges who signed off on the 6-1 ruling are themselves Harper appointees only compounds the damage to the already strained relationship between the top court and the ruling Conservatives.

The Court’s rebuttal of every argument the federal government marshalled to support its contention that it could unilaterally tweak the eligibility requirements to sit on the top bench also does not bode well for Ottawa’s agenda on Senate reform.

On the upper house the federal government’s case similarly rests on the notion that it has the legal leeway to move to an elected Senate without securing the support of most or all provinces for a constitutional amendment.

Friday’s ruling makes clear that the federal government cannot change the composition of the top court without unanimous provincial support. The same — for the record — holds true for abolishing the Supreme Court altogether. There is no venue to appeal those conclusions.

It is hard to see what option other than going back to the drawing board to fill Nadon’s now vacant seat the prime minister has. And while Harper could, in retaliation, drag his feet on that, the bottom line is that he would be cutting off his nose to spite his face.

This is a time when the prime minister can ill afford to cripple the court by taking his time to fill a vacancy, especially one from Quebec.

For Marois, whose government won the day, there’s no cause to uncork the champagne this weekend.

From the PQ’s political perspective, a victory that confirms that Quebec has a veto over the composition of the Supreme Court and that its three civil-law spots on the top bench are constitutionally protected is ultimately an untimely development.

In the immediate, it does little to help the sovereigntist party regain the initiative on the Liberals in a competitive election campaign. On that score PQ strategists could be forgiven for finding the timing of the ruling suspicious.

The Supreme Court is the master of its schedule. It could almost certainly have waited until after the Quebec election in a few weeks to deliver its ruling. Chances are it would have done so if its conclusions had gone the other way.

In the larger picture Friday’s ruling further undermines a key element of the PQ’s narrative. The party has always maintained that the Supreme Court is a political creature of the federal government; one that — by definition — is stacked against Quebec.

Friday’s declaration of Supreme Court independence from the federal government makes that assertion harder to sustain just as a major battle of wills between the PQ and the top court may be at hand.

If Marois is re-elected with a majority government next month, her controversial secularism charter will become law. As certainly as day follows night, that will pave the way for a legal challenge that will just as inevitably end up in the Supreme Court.

A time when the dream of another referendum on sovereignty is alive and well within the PQ is also no time to chip away at the court’s already oft-challenged legitimacy in Quebec from the purview of the Prime Minister’s Office.

The federal Clarity Act that so many see as the Canadian handbook to another referendum is based on the prescriptions of the Supreme Court.

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Given all that, Harper should thank the court from having short-circuited his misguided attempt to establish that he could toy with Quebec’s seats on the top bench as he saw fit.

This is one of those occasions when a bad day for the current government of Canada is a good day for federalism.

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