Liberals Win Majority in Canada Vote

Canadians went to the polls Monday and elected a majority Liberal Party government, to be led by Jean Chretien, a 59-year-old French-speaker from Quebec.

At the end of a campaign season characterized by greater partisan, linguistic and regional division than this country has known in decades, voters here delivered a scathing rebuke to the Progressive Conservative Party, which has governed since 1984.

With the polls still open at 8 p.m. in British Columbia, it was unclear whether Prime Minister Kim Campbell would manage to retain her own seat in Vancouver, a seat she won in 1988 by a negligible, 269-vote margin. What was overwhelmingly clear, though, was that the voters had rejected Campbell’s party and its track record of conservative economics and free international trade.

Chretien, a small-town lawyer who speaks English with a pronounced French-Canadian accent complicated by a lifelong facial paralysis, stands for a centrist set of policies including job creation through public works, gentle budget cuts and a looser monetary policy.

Chretien also promised during his campaign to work for revisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement, although the changes he seeks are not likely to be extensive. He has been criticized throughout the campaign season for failing to present a detailed, coherent economic policy, and many analysts believe that his party was elected because voters were angry with the Tories and frightened of everything else.

Although he is from a province that regularly threatens to secede, Chretien is a strong federalist who has openly ridiculed those who would make Quebec a separate state.

Within French-speaking Quebec, the Liberals lost to the separatist Bloc Quebecois. But they swept the four Atlantic provinces and the huge central province of Ontario.

What was unclear Monday evening as western Canadians continued to vote was what kind of opposition Chretien’s Liberals would face in the next Parliament.

In Canadian politics, the party with the second-largest number of seats has the right to become “Her Majesty’s loyal opposition,” an official status that brings an official residence, government financing, a research staff and other perks.

With votes from western Canada still untallied, it was not yet apparent whether the Bloc Quebecois or the Alberta-based Reform Party would form the official opposition.

The Bloc and the Reform Party are both formerly small, strongly ideological, regionally rooted parties that have flowered in this campaign season.

The Bloc has promised to work in Parliament for Quebec’s independence from Canada. Never before have separatists achieved such power at a federal level, and predictions about Canada’s immediate future are being confounded.

“We’ve never, in our history, had members in our federal Parliament who are for the destruction of our country,” said Paul DeVillers, a French-speaking Liberal who was elected in his Ontario riding--as Canadians call their electoral districts--about 100 miles north of Toronto. “It’s hard to predict how they would conduct themselves.”

Bloc Quebecois leader Lucien Bouchard, a charismatic French-speaking lawyer, has sent mixed signals, promising on some occasions to work constructively in Parliament but on others to make trouble if the government fails to heed the wishes of Quebec nationalists.

Meanwhile, in the West, the Reform Party was expected to make a strong showing with its platform of drastic federal budget cuts and a reduction in the number of immigrants allowed into Canada. The Reform Party takes a Canada-love-it-or-leave-it stance on the Quebec question.

Walsh reported from Toronto and Turner from Shawinigan, Quebec.