The Tories say goodbye.

Prime Minister Kim Campbell's attempt to rescue the Tories from the unpopularity of the Mulroney years failed abysmally in the October 25 general election. Angry voters savaged her Progressive Conservative party, from New-foundland to Vancouver. In the Atlantic province of New Brunswick, only Elsie Wayne, the popular former mayor of Saint John, was elected as a Tory. And in Quebec, where former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's party had won sixty seats in 1988, the Tories retained only one seat, that won by Jean Charest. This time out, the avowedly separatist Bloc Quebecois, led by former Mulroney cabinet minister Lucien Bouchard, took fifty-four seats, giving the Bloc the status of the official opposition.

In Ontario, the Reform party--an extreme-right, populist party led by Preston Manning of Alberta--divided the already weakened conservative vote to give the Liberals an unprecedented sweep in Canada's most populous province: ninety-eight out of ninety-nine seats. The remaining seat went to the Reform party, while the mildly left New Democratic party (NDP) lost all ten of its seats and the Tories lost forty-two.

In the prairie provinces, the Liberals continued their sweep, gaining eight seats in Manitoba and five in Saskatchewan. In Alberta, however, the Liberals got only four seats. Here, the Reform party rolled up a total of twenty-two seats and added twenty-four more in British Columbia (compared to the Liberals' six). The Tories lost eleven seats in British Columbia, including Kim Campbell's, and the NDP retained only two of its previous seventeen seats. In the Yukon, NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin held her seat but the rest of the North went Liberal.

The defeat of the Tories and the NDP was so total that neither got the twelve seats needed to qualify for official party status in the House of Commons. As a result, they will not be granted research budgets, nor will they be allowed to ask questions in committees without the agreement of other members. While the NDP has been there before, this is without precedent for the Progressive Conservative party.

What does it all mean? For starters, the ersatz character of the Tory campaign convinced nobody. It had been hoped that Kim Campbell, projecting an image of youth (she is forty-six) and new beginnings, could overcome the bitterness many felt toward Brian Mulroney and the Tories. Not only were the Tories blamed for the recession (not entirely a bum rap), but they have never been forgiven for the GST (Goods and Services Tax, a national sales tax). Campbell was haunted by a statement she had made while campaigning for leadership of British Columbia's Social Credit party: "Charisma without substance is dangerous." In this campaign she demonstrated that a failed attempt at charisma without substance is ludicrous. She also attempted the impossible: to turn her back on Mulroney without repudiating a single one of the policies and practices that had made him the most disliked prime minister in recent history. This was made worse by a number of gaffes during the campaign, the most serious being a statement to the effect that a campaign is no place to debate serious issues.

The Liberals hardly needed to campaign. They cautiously went through the motions. Jean Chretien, the new Liberal prime minister, is an old hand, although at fifty-nine he is hardly over the hill. The Tories tried and failed to depict him as "yesterday's man." He promised jobs, as Mulroney had in 1984, and the preservation of Canada's health-care programs. Tory advertisement rediculed Chretien's proposals for job creation even as Campbell stated that nothing could be done to lower unemployment before the end of the century. For the rest of it, the Liberals relied mainly on the popular perception of what they represent and the widespread desire of an overwhelming majority to get rid of the Tories.

Unlike the Tories, the Liberals are a party that retains belief in governance. They are not dogmatically opposed to government intervention in the economy. They are pledged to renegotiate the trade agreement with the United States (FTA), particularly since the proposed NAFTA agreement gives Mexico some leverage over resources that Canada does not have in the FTA. Finally, the desire for stability of a majority government in a race that fielded five major parties was also a factor.

While the Liberals have a solid majority, 177 of 295 seats, the opposition is such as to make the next Parliament a bizarre affair. The Reform party had pledged to eliminate the deficit in three years without raising taxes. This is the measure of the unreality of their economic utopia. And while there was never any danger of their forming a government, they came within two seats of forming the official opposition. That space is now occupied by the nationalist Bloc Quebecois, whose position is somewhat enigmatic. The Bloc may be something more than a protest vote, and it rankles some English Canadians that a separatist party should form the official opposition. For Lucien Bouchard himself, the position is something of a mixed blessing. His own power is mostly symbolic, and given the realities of power, the move from the symbolic to the real will pose difficulties.

Geography and the absurdities of Canada's "winner-take-all" electoral system are much in evidence. The Tories got 17 percent of the popular vote but only two seats. The NDP, with 7 percent of the vote, got nine. And the Reform party, with 20 percent, got fifty-two seats. (By comparison, in the most recent Parliament the NDP had 20 percent of the vote but only forty-three seats.) While the Liberals are fairly thin on the ground in the West, they can, with justice, claim to be the only truly national party. The Reform party had high hopes of becoming more widespread geographically, but it has only one seat east of Manitoba. The fact that the Tories retain only two seats in all of Canada may be Mulroney's last testament to the party he took over in 1984.

Since Canada does not have a system of proportional representative, pre-election fears of an Italian-style Parliament with five strong parties have vanished. The country has the stability of a solid majority government. The Liberals' only constraints are the limits of the possible; their perceptions about what can be accomplished through government are somewhat more optimistic than either their predecessors' or the opposition in the new Parliament. There was, on October 25, a near-consensus to the effect that the country is a mess. In Canada, the transition to a new government takes about ten days and is accomplished rather quietly. As for what it really means, we shall know more in a year's time.