The Liberal party won government Monday night with a thin majority – 155 seats in a 301 seat Parliament – and a much stronger and more diverse four-party opposition.
Reform, with an overwhelming base in western Canada but no breakthrough east of Manitoba, will be the Official Opposition with 60 seats.
And the New Democratic Party, buoyed by an eight-seat breakthrough in Atlantic Canada, will be back in parliament as an official party with 21 seats that include Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.
Canadian Labor Congress president Bob White said the next parliament will be a better parliament. “I see it as more reflective of the Canadian people.”
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Conservative leader Jean Charest, who will lead 20 MPs into the House of Commons but remains mired in fifth place in the parliamentary race, far below party expectations, had a different version. “I see again a fractured parliament.”
The Tories elected just one western MP – Brandon’s Rick Borotsik – and will be largely a party of Atlantic Canada, which gave them 14 MPs.
Yet fractured or not, the result had at least one national farm leader smiling.
Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson said he expects farm issues to play a greater role, particularly with a stronger NDP voice and a weak Liberal government anxious to win support.
“I’m looking forward to this parliament,” he said from his northern Ontario farm late June 2. “I think big majorities run the risk of making bad decisions and getting arrogant. A slim majority or a minority government works best. I am looking for more attention to our issues from this parliament.”
University of Saskatchewan agricultural economist Hartley Furtan, former deputy agriculture minister in Saskatchewan, looked at the strong Reform showing and predicted the party will have much more influence over Liberal agriculture and transportation policy in the 36th parliament.
Reform dominates Prairies
He noted Reform won most of the prairie agriculture-based seats, even though its policy on the Canadian Wheat Board is to end the monopoly.
For the Liberals, the election was a squeaker. Even prime minister Jean ChrŽtien struggled to win his Saint-Maurice seat in Quebec that he has held almost continuously since 1963.
In the end, British Columbians who sent Liberals back to Ottawa decided it would be a majority government, rather than a minority.
With the victory, ChrŽtien can claim to be the first Liberal leader to win back-to-back majority victories since Louis St. Laurent in 1953.
Still, with less than 39 percent of the vote, it is the smallest vote total for a majority government in Canadian history.
Only the near-Liberal sweep of Ontario, and the strength of the Conservative vote in Quebec which drained votes from the Bloc QuŽbecois, allowed the Liberals to slip back into power.
It almost certainly was ChrŽtien’s last election. It guaranteed him the chance to lead Canada into the 21st century, as his Liberal hero Sir Wilfrid Laurier led Canada into the 20th century.
ChrŽtien told the nation Monday night that despite the decline in the Liberal vote, he would “govern for the whole country.”
He said he expected all the opposition parties to operate on the “Canadian values of tolerance … generosity and inclusion” – a direct message to Reform and its tough talk on Quebec.
For the NDP and leader Alexa McDonough, it was a night to celebrate a return to political visibility and respectability, as well as a breakthrough in Atlantic Canada.
