THE LIBERAL Government of Mr Jean Chretien has won a narrow victory in the Canadian election. However the country has been left more divided than ever in its regional blocs.
Mr Chretien tried to put a good face on a result which saw his party drop 21 seats, the loss of two high-profile ministers and its overall majority reduced to two. There are now serious doubts whether the 63-year-old Liberal leader will continue to lead his party through its second consecutive term; the Minister for Finance, Mr Paul Martin, is being mentioned as his likely successor.
The results were also a setback for the separatist Bloc Quebecois under the lacklustre Mr Gilles Duceppe. It lost nine seats in the federal parliament and its position as official opposition to the right-wing Reform Party which is now the biggest opposition party.
Within Quebec, the Bloc won 45 of the province's 75 seats. But more significantly, the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives, who oppose independence for the French-speaking province, won 58 per cent of the Quebec votes between them.
The Parti Quebecois, which is the provincial organisation of the separatists, will now have to consider whether to press forward with another referendum on independence which was expected in 1999. The separatists will first have to test the waters in a provincial election next year.
The success of the Reform Party of Mr Preston Manning, which takes over as the official opposition with 60 seats, also means that a tougher line will be taken in Ottawa with Quebec demands for sovereignty. Mr Manning's insistence during the campaign that Quebec should not be given a special status and that the negative consequences of separation for its population should be clearly spelled out seemed to go down well with the electorate.
But the Reform Party failed to make its hoped-for breakthrough in Ontario, which accounts for 103 of the 301 federal parliament seats. This means that Reform's base is largely confined to the western states of Alberta and British Columbia.
The Progressive Conservatives of Mr Jean Charest are also disappointed with their poor showing in Ontario, where they won only one seat. Even their high profile candidate, the former UN commander Cen Lewis Mackenzie of Bosnia fame, failed to get elected.
The Conservatives, with 20 seats overall, improved on their disastrous 1993 performance, when they were reduced to two seats. But there is now pressure on them to consider a merger with the Reform Party, without which a breaking of the Liberals' stranglehold on Ontario seems unlikely.
Relations are so bad, however, between Mr Manning and Mr Charest that merger talks are unlikely in the short term. Mr Charest accused Mr Manning of being a "bigot" during the campaign over a Reform TV ad implying that Mr Charest as a native of Quebec could not be trusted to oppose the separatist movement.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the election was the good showing of the small left-wing New Democratic Party (NPD) under its new leader, Ms Alexa McDonough who campaigned on jobs and healthcare issues. The NPD has gone from nine to 21 seats, with strong gains in the Atlantic provinces where there was anger over the government's treatment of unemployed fishermen and cuts in social insurance.
Overall, the election results show a Canada politically divided into geographical blocs more than ever before. The ruling Liberals are virtually an Ontario party with some support in Quebec, while Reform represents the west and the Conservatives and the NPD the eastern provinces but from opposing ideological viewpoints.
The election has also pushed the Quebec question to the forefront, where Mr Chretien had been hoping it would be fought solely on his economic record. His critics say that the campaign exposed his lack of "vision" for Canada in the 21st century and his indecisiveness towards the gnawing problem of Quebec where he had been hoping to buy off the separatists with more concessions.
The tougher approach to Quebec nicknamed "Plan B" is now likely to prevail. The Supreme Court will rule later this year on whether the state can't make a unilateral declaration of independence which it threatens to do once it wins a referendum. But at the end of the day it will be politics and not legal niceties which will prevail.
The French-language Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir, comments that the results "place all the political groups in an unstable balance which mirrors the real Canada - a country deeply and ever more divided".
The conservative Globe and Mail analyst, Edward Greenspon, uses even gloomier language when he writes: "Not only is Parliament bitterly Balkanised, its divisions go to the heart of Canadian politics - increasingly a heart of Canadians seem to like to talk themselves into these dark moods while ignoring the prosperity so visible all around them. Sierra Leone or the Congo it is not.