CANADA / A MESSAGE TO OTTAWA : Ontario Socialists Taking Driver’s Seat : On Monday, they’ll lead the province for the first time.

The first socialist provincial government in Ontario history will take office Monday, buoying socialist political fortunes across Canada but raising questions about the economic outlook in the country’s most populous and industrialized province.

Ontario Premier-elect Bob Rae has told Ontarians that he has no problems with deficit spending to stimulate sagging economies. But however unsettling that may be to fiscal conservatives, Rae, who comes from the right wing of his New Democratic Party (NDP), has also said that he doesn’t intend to adhere strictly to the party’s socialist platform.

Since Sept. 6, when Rae and his party swept to victory in Ontario, pollsters have noted an upwelling of support for the NDP across Canada. The central prairie province of Manitoba held elections shortly after Ontario did, and there, the New Democrats came in a respectable second.

Normally, the New Democrats are Canada’s third-largest political party, trailing the two larger mainstream parties, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals. While the NDP has governed before in the less populous provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, as well as in the Yukon Territory, this is the first time it has been elected in powerful Ontario, home to more than a third of Canadians.

“All bets are off,” says John Wright, group vice president of the Angus Reid Group, a polling concern. “This is like somebody who’s never gone skinny-dipping before. (Ontarians) have just taken off their clothes and jumped into the water. They don’t know how cold the water is, or what’s beneath the surface.”

Few political analysts are reading a sudden taste for socialism into the Ontario vote. Rather, the rise of the NDP is being taken as a sign of widespread cynicism--even revulsion--toward the existing political order in Canada--and a willingness to try out an untraditional party that offered the hope of reform.

“People are angry,” says Wright. “They’re upset by how much change has happened in the last two years.”

The mood makes him think other small parties will be taking off in other parts of Canada in the future: the separatist Parti Quebecois in Quebec, for instance, and the regionalist Reform Party in the Far West.

Canadians are particularly upset with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a Progressive Conservative who has taken a number of highly unpopular economic, constitutional and foreign-policy measures over the last two years. His economic and foreign policies have tracked far too closely with U.S. Republican thinking for Canadian tastes. And his constitutional vision aroused French-English and east-west antagonisms so much that some Canadians fear their country could break up.

But Ontario voters who wanted to show their displeasure with Mulroney didn’t have much appetite for the rival Liberals. Liberals are widely viewed with cynicism these days because they tend to lambaste the Conservatives for policies they themselves implemented the last time they governed.

On Monday, Ontarians will be watching closely when Rae takes office and names his Cabinet. His selections for such key posts as finance minister will send signals about what kind of government his will be.

NDP dogma calls for tougher taxes on corporations, real estate speculators, large estates and manufacturers who use unrecyclable packaging materials; higher welfare payments and tax breaks for the poor; the abolition of the existing auto-insurance industry and creation of a government-run system; a freeze on nuclear-power development; a gradually imposed ban on toxic discharges into waterways; the nationalization of huge smelting, mining and forest-cutting operations, and more money for day care, in-home nursing and education.

New Democrats have also promised to ignore a Free Trade Agreement that Mulroney signed with the United States more than 18 months ago.

But one of the first things Rae did upon his election was calm the anxious Ontario business class, saying at a news conference that he doesn’t intend to nationalize the smelters after all and that he can’t give a timetable for any nuclear freeze. He said he wasn’t going to be able to do much to “ignore” the Free Trade Accord, since it was struck at the federal level, but he said he would look for ways to mitigate the job losses Canadians widely believe free trade causes. He promised to be “fiscally responsible,” saying he will consult with affected groups before implementing new taxes or regulations.