Next Step : Political Fault Lines Crisscross Canada : The two-party system threatens to break apart in next week’s election. ‘Fringe’ groups score well in opinion polls.

Until three years ago, Peter Lang, a commercial airline pilot, had what he supposed was a “perverse hobby”: a self-described public-finance junkie, he enjoyed poring over Canada’s budget-deficit figures in his free time.

What he found in the government ledger books filled him with grief about the future and anger at politicians. “I know where the national debt took New Zealand, and I know where it’s taking us,” he says.

For years, Lang’s hobby led him nowhere. Canada, he concluded, offered no “political home” for undiluted conservatives like him.

Throughout its 126-year history, this country has been governed by two large parties--the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals--which can fairly be likened to America’s Rebublicans and Democrats, respectively.

But those two mainstream parties have been a huge disappointment to people like Lang.

Year after year, they hung out their virtues at election time; broke their campaign promises; dispensed sinecures to hacks, bottom dwellers and bagmen, and built up sizable budget deficits. And they seemed eternally entrenched: Here in Orillia, a pleasant town of 25,000 on the shores of Lake Simcoe in Ontario province, Progressive Conservatives have held the parliamentary seat for the last 36 years.

*

Today, however, Lang no longer considers himself a political orphan--and there are thousands of other Canadians like him.

This country will go to the polls next Monday, and never before have so many Canadians intended to vote for small parties prospering on what used to be considered the lunatic fringe.

It adds up to a huge backlash against the old order, begging comparison to the political disenchantment that drove so many Americans into the arms of Ross Perot in 1992.

But in this respect, there is an important difference between the United States and Canada: In America’s winner-take-all presidential system, Perot could get 18.9% of the popular vote and still be unrepresented in Washington. In Canada’s parliamentary system, by contrast, upstart parties that win in their districts--called ridings--can go on to Ottawa and partake in full of the national power pageant.

That’s what stands to happen here next week, and it heralds a sea-change for America’s northern neighbor.

After 126 years of stability and predictable government by centrists, Canada’s next Parliament is likely to be made up of four or five parties, none of which agree with the others and all of them threatening to battle vote after vote for power and the ideological high ground.

Canada could easily wind up with a fractured, even paralyzed, Parliament, just at a time when expectations for the new government are running unrealistically high.

The mood suggests a long night of uncharacteristic turbulence, linguistic bickering and general mean-spiritedness ahead for Canada--perhaps even the end of an era when this country could hold itself out as a tolerant, prosperous, well-governed alternative to the slash-and-burn political culture on offer in the United States.

That’s a frightening prospect to many.

“It is a retreat into institutionalized regionalism we have not seen in this country since Confederation (in 1867),” worries David Peterson, a former Liberal Party premier of Ontario and a leading light of the federalist Establishment.

Not so, retorts Lang. He sees in the pending upheavals a healthy chance for Canadians to let off steam and clean house.

“Another majority government would lock us all up for another five years,” he says. “I don’t think that’s good for the country. Because if (politics) is all blocked up for another five years, the political dissent we have in this country now is going to look like a birthday party.”

For Lang, a political homecoming has been possible because his airline job took him regularly to the western prairie province of Alberta.

Lang likes to read local newspapers when he travels, and in Alberta, he says, he kept seeing accounts of a local protest movement--something called the Reform Party.

The party did not have a single seat in the House of Commons, but it stood for much of what Lang favored: strict tax-and-spend discipline, a return to “traditional” Canadian values and a throw-the-bums-out sense of outrage about conventional politicians.

“One day, I called up,” he says. The Reform Party wasn’t particularly interested in enrolling a new member from Ontario; Reformers saw powerful, big-money Ontario as the enemy, and party bylaws actually prohibited them from organizing anywhere east of Manitoba.

But Lang managed to join anyway and, after the party amended its constitution, he helped form chapters in two Ontario towns.

Finally, in 1990, Lang helped bring Reform Party leader Preston Manning east to Ontario for the first time.

The venue was to be here in Orillia. It was a gamble: Lang remembers the way people hooted when he told them that Manning would appear at the opera house, a main-street landmark of buttresses and towers, big enough to seat 800 people. Who in prim, strait-laced Ontario, the naysayers demanded, would come out to hear a right-wing hayseed from Alberta ranting about runaway government?

But as it turned out, Manning packed the opera house, and 200 enthusiasts were even turned away. Within months, 8,000 Ontarians had taken out Reform Party cards.

And now, the polls suggest that Reform will go next week from its present single seat in Parliament to a second- or a close third-place representation. That means a body blow for the governing Progressive Conservatives.

“These were people who joined a party that wasn’t even allowed to organize in their province,” Lang says proudly. “To me, that gives a party legitimacy.”

Even as the Reform Party flexes its muscles in English-speaking Canada, another former fringe group is poised for a portentous sweep of its own, in the huge French-speaking province of Quebec.

The Bloc Quebecois, 3 years old, is a single-issue party devoted to making Quebec independent of Canada. (It is not to be confused with the older Parti Quebecois, which is active only at the provincial level.)

Though the Bloc ranks at less than 10% of the popular vote nationally, in Quebec, polls have been saying it could win as many as two-thirds of the province’s 75 parliamentary seats. In the Canadian parliamentary system, that could give it enough of a caucus to prevent any other party from forming a majority government.

Never, in all Canada’s history, have Quebec separatists achieved such power on a federal level.

With these two upstarts on the ascent, Canadian political observers are spinning all sorts of exotic scenarios of what this country’s next Parliament will look like, and how it will operate.

In one extreme, but mathematically plausible, outcome, the federalist Liberal Party would win a majority, but the Bloc Quebecois would form the official opposition. “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition,” as it is formally known, gets numerous perks in Ottawa, including an official residence and key positions on various legislative committees. Thus Quebec sovereigntists could end up well-positioned to write Quebec’s special interests into every bill that comes before the House of Commons.

In a likelier result, the Liberals would win only enough seats to form a minority government, and would find themselves unable to build voting coalitions with their prickly rivals. Their government would soon fall, paving the way for yet another election--and even more uncertainty.

Another election “would be unthinkable,” says Paul DeVillers, a French-speaking lawyer who is running for Parliament on the mainline Liberal Party ticket here in Orillia. “Basically, there has been no business done in this country for the past two years.”

Indeed, federal politicians in Canada have spent much of their time since 1990 on doomed attempts at amending the national constitution in ways favorable to Quebec. (Quebec has never ratified the constitution, on the grounds that it fails adequately to accommodate the interests of linguistic minorities.)

And no sooner was the constitution-writing shelved than the politicians became preoccupied with the current electoral campaign.

As a result, says DeVillers, “there are a lot of items backlogged that have to be dealt with”--a yawning budget deficit, 11%-plus unemployment, and Canada’s increasingly worrisome inability to make itself competitive in the global trading arena.

To leave such crucial business on hold for yet another campaign season, DeVillers believes, “would be a tragedy.”