BC date getting misinterpreted?

The test case is fairly simple:

curs.execute("SELECT '044-03-15 BC'::date")
rows = curs.fetchall()

This results in:

ValueError: year -43 is out of range

[This is Python 3.6, in 2.7, the value is missing]

This was working since last October, but the error started happening 
around the Ides of March (my actual dates are different, but I changed 
the example to fit :-)

Tested against 9.3 thru 10.

Joe