Allan Rock, perhaps appropriately, was first to mount the podium. It was the federal Justice Minister who not so long ago delivered himself of the opinion that whatever may be the legal status of a unilateral declaration of independence, it was "a technical question." The real question, he said, was strictly political. But now, having reluctantly, belatedly, almost apologetically sought intervenor status in Mr. Bertrand's case, it is Mr. Rock who sings hymns to the rule of law. The judgment, he said, shows that "the primacy of law is the governing principle ... the whole process is subject to the rule of law." Mr. Rock's conversion is perhaps understandable: he is, after all, the Justice Minister, and occasionally is required to apply the law. But what are we to make of the other instruments of received opinion? What of The Globe and Mail, which now sternly insists that Canada may not be dismembered "through the simple dictation of desires from Quebec," when for years it has upheld the opposite? Or the Toronto Star, which is now bold enough to challenge "the separatist myth that 'the people's will' is paramount, and that voting for something automatically legitimizes it," when just a year ago it was equally insistent that "we live in a democracy: Quebeckers can choose to stay or go as they wish"?

It's easy enough to explain this newfound appreciation for the rule of law, since it would not seem to require the political class to renounce its most basic assumption: that in fact Quebeckers do have the right to decide, on their own, to destroy the country. They just have to ask us nicely. By sticking to the legal, negotiated route, the Globe hummed happily in an earlier editorial, the PQ "would avoid ... the prospect of a bitter, prolonged confrontation." Indeed, "it would mean a clean break with Quebec," thus "preserving social peace" and other good things, not including Canada.

So you see, by backing Mr. Bertrand, Mr. Rock is actually doing the PQ a favour. Mr. Rock himself likes to say that going by the book ensures that something called "change" happens in a stable, orderly way. In some corners, this is called the new federalist "hard line." What is harder to understand is why, given the reason they now find the rule of law so unthreatening, they were so hysterical in attacking it before. I do not know whether Gordon Gibson, the lapsed federalist from B.C. who now graces the Globe's op-ed pages, still holds to the opinion earlier expressed of legal challenges to secession, viz. that "to the extent that anyone takes this fatuity seriously, it is a gold mine for the separatists." But I do know that it is "this fatuity," more than any single federalist initiative, that is giving the separatists fits. Quebeckers, it turns out, are as interested in living in a law- based state as any other group of people on earth.

Likewise, I cannot be sure that the former Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bosley, would still pretend that the Constitution is "irrelevant" in these matters — "separation is a totally political question" — invoked only by those obsessed with what the historian Kenneth McRoberts termed "narrow legalisms." But I can be reasonably sure why it upsets them so much to talk about it. It is because, in the mirror of Guy Bertrand's courage, they see their own ashamed faces. Why, indeed, has it taken a former separatist to state the obvious? Why did it take so long for the federal government to exercise its reponsibility, even in part, and why does it still leave the future of the country to M. Bertrand's meagre resources, rather than refer the matter directly to the Supreme Court?

The reasoning for this reluctance is as shoddy as ever, as if the political and the legal did not intimately inform each other. But the earlier vitriol suggested another, deeper, darker truth: in challenging the legality of secession, it is not just the Parti Québécois government that M. Bertrand is up against. It is the whole Canadian political class.