It’s not the kind of pol-itical mistake Robert Bourassa would have made.

More than a decade after his death, the former Liberal premier — or, at least, his name — is at the centre of one of the hottest controversies that Montreal municipal politics has seen in recent years.

The trouble began with a surprise announcement that the city’s powerful executive committee, led by Mayor Gerald Tremblay, had decided to recognize Bourassa by renaming a street in his honour. Tremblay, a former minister in Bourassa’s cabinet, chose Park Avenue, an artery that’s both literally and figuratively at the centre of the city’s life and history, to become Bourassa Avenue.

No one is arguing Bourassa doesn’t merit recognition for his almost 15 years in power, which included some of the most tumultuous in recent history. First elected in 1970 as Quebec’s youngest premier, Bourassa’s government undertook massive hydroelectric development in the James Bay region, introduced universal health insurance and recognized French as Quebec’s official language.

But Park Avenue isn’t just any street. It runs north from Sherbrooke Street, past the city’s cherished Mount Royal park and through a neighbourhood of Greek restaurants, mom-and-pop stores and walk-up apartments. The surrounding low-rise neighbourhoods have been home to successive waves of immigrants and are at the heart of Montreal’s story over the past two centuries.

The proposed name change was met with outrage from Park Avenue merchants, heritage activists and many Montreal residents. More than 40,000 signed online petitions; opponents held rallies, lobbied council members and fought against changing the name of Park Avenue and its downtown extension, Bleury Street, at council meetings.

The controversy has been even more intense than the one that met an 1988 decision to rename Dorchester Boulevard, a downtown thoroughfare, to boul. René-Lévesque to honour the late Parti Québécois premier. That change caused much hard feeling, especially in the English-speaking community. As a result, the street remains named Dorchester where it runs through the wealthy municipality of Westmount.

The Park/Bourassa flap was too much for Helen Fotopoulos, the borough mayor for the central part of the Park Avenue area. She was excoriated for supporting Tremblay, her party leader, on the name change. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, she changed her mind and opposed the change before it was brought to a council vote in late November.

Other councillors from Tremblay’s party — notably from more ethnic and English-speaking western neighbourhoods — also voted “no” on the change. But Tremblay persisted and used his strong majority to push the name change through.

Still, the dust-up has been damaging to Tremblay, especially because it seems to confirm an image of arrogance.

It’s hard to imagine Bourassa getting into the same kind of jam, were he in Tremblay’s shoes. The former premier was notorious for keeping a close eye on public opinion polls and being afraid of disturbing what he called “the social peace.”

That worked against him when he waffled endlessly on the language of commercial signs before invoking the Constitution’s “notwithstanding clause” in 1988 to shield Bill 101’s French-only provisions.

But Bourassa, who was premier from 1970 to 1976 and again from 1985 to 1994, won four elections with a charisma-free public persona. He knew how to avoid hornets’ nests like renaming Park Avenue.

Although opponents of the name change lost the city council vote, their fight is far from over. They have hired a lawyer and made their case to a provincial commission that oversees official names.

Quebec’s toponymy commission has to approve the Bourassa Avenue name change and is unlikely to do so, opponents argue. (Although municipalities have the power to name streets, the toponymy commission must officially approve them.)

But just what happens in case of disagreement is a grey area and may cause a tussle in this case. The commission’s guidelines for name changes require, among other things, that they be carried out after public consultation and in an absence of controversy. The existing name must also be shown to have lost its usefulness or relevancy.

Whichever way it goes, Montreal residents won’t easily forget this episode. It may come back to haunt Tremblay at election time. IE