I noticed that the original poster have already supplied a patch which also chomps the newline at the end of the back-qoute's output.
Here is my suggestion for a possibly a better version - we already have perl after all so why use "cut"?
--- dh-make-perl.old 2006-08-29 12:01:02.000000000 +1000
+++ dh-make-perl.new 2006-10-06 15:38:33.000000000 +1000
@@ -143,7 +143,7 @@
#my $section = 'interpreters';
my $section = 'perl';
my $depends = '${perl:Depends}';
-my $bdependsi = 'perl (>= ' . `dpkg -p perl|grep ^Version:|cut -f 2 -d \ ` . ')';
+my $bdependsi = 'perl (>= ' . (split(' ', `dpkg -p perl|grep ^Version:`))[1] . ')';
my $bdepends = 'debhelper (>=
5.0.0)';
my $maintainer = get_maintainer();
my $arch = 'all';
--Amos
