Canada Gives Chretien 2nd Term but Less Clout

TORONTO — Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien was reelected Monday with a reduced majority in Parliament after an election campaign that deepened the regional animosities pulling this country.

Late returns showed Chretien’s centrist Liberal Party, running on its economic record, winning 155 of the 301 seats in the House of Commons by piling up votes in central Canada, particularly the populous province of Ontario. But the Liberals, heavily favored from the beginning of the campaign, won fewer seats and a smaller percentage of the vote than in the previous election, in 1993. Chretien struggled to win in his own district in rural Quebec, where he has been elected nine times previously dating back to 1963.

Speaking in his hometown of Shawinigan, Chretien pledged to continue following a course of deficit reduction, preservation of social programs and--”above all”--national unity.

“We will approach our mandate with a national spirit, a national outlook and a national vision,” he said. “I pledge to govern for the whole country in the interest of all Canadians.”

The disappointing result, however, fueled immediate speculation among political commentators that Chretien, 63, may retire before the end of his new, five-year term and before Quebec’s separatists mount another referendum aimed at winning independence for the French-speaking province. The separatists barely lost a 1995 referendum in the province, and Chretien was accused of badly mishandling that campaign.

The Reform Party, a right-wing populist movement that emerged from the western prairies only in the last election, finished second with 60 seats. Although Reform won few seats outside its western stronghold, its leader, Preston Manning, who advocates smaller government, lower taxes and a hard line toward the separatists, nonetheless called his party “the national alternative to the Liberals.”

“The old political landscape is changing, and it will be shaped by new forces and new ideas,” he said in Calgary, Alberta. “Canada has entered a new season of transition . . . and it is one to be welcomed rather than to be feared.”

The remaining seats in what analysts predicted will be a fractious and combative Parliament will be divided among three other parties: the Bloc Quebecois, which advocates Quebec independence and won 44 seats in the province; the leftist New Democratic Party, led by Alexa McDonough of Nova Scotia, with 21 seats; and the Progressive Conservatives, who were nearly wiped out in the 1993 election but came back this time with 20 seats.

Conservative leader Jean Charest was generally credited with the best performance of any candidate for prime minister, and the Conservatives won the second-largest number of votes nationwide, but they were spread so thin it resulted in few seats in Parliament. None of the five parties showed strength across the whole of Canada, a state of political fragmentation that analysts called unprecedented.

“The result reflects a divided country,” said Kenneth McRoberts, a political science professor at York University here and author of “Misconceiving Canada,” a new book on Canadian national unity. “The government will not have a strong base across the country as a whole, and neither will any other party. . . . We’ll have a Parliament that’s not really equipped to do much in the way of national reconciliation.”

Chretien based his reelection campaign largely on his success in reducing Canada’s once-formidable budget deficit and on the resulting drop in inflation and interest rates. Although Canadians’ personal income has declined during his 3 1/2 years in office, and unemployment remains high--9.6% nationally in the latest report--Chretien has argued that the government austerity program will set the stage for sharp economic growth and greater prosperity in the next few years.

His opponents countered that he had done too little to stimulate job creation. The Conservatives and the Reform Party argued for tax cuts, while the New Democrats advocated increased taxes and more government spending.

But Chretien also has been careful to stake out the moderate middle ground on most issues. That benefits the Liberals when there are as many as five candidates on the ballot in many parliamentary districts. Each seat is awarded to the highest vote-getter in each district, even if the victor receives only a plurality.

Under Canadian law, Chretien was not required to call an election until the fall of 1998, and his decision to go to the polls so early annoyed many voters. Chretien’s explanation--that he wanted a mandate to carry his government into the 21st century--was largely dismissed by Canadians, who instead saw the early election as an attempt to capitalize on polls showing the Liberal Party leading all rivals by 25 percentage points or more.

But that calculation may have backfired. Chretien got off on the wrong foot by announcing the election just as the Red River overflowed its banks, inundating southern Manitoba with Canada’s flood of the century. The timing made it appear as if Chretien was more worried about politics than about Canadians fighting to save their homes and farms.

That and Chretien’s dull performance on the campaign trail led to a steady erosion of the Liberals’ poll rankings, though they never appeared to be in danger of falling into second place.

The only emotional flare-up in the campaign arose from Manning’s explicit appeal to anti-Quebec feelings in Canada’s English-speaking majority, particularly in the west. Alone among major party leaders, Manning argued that Quebec should not be given special recognition in Canada’s Constitution as the only majority French-speaking province. But a television commercial for Manning’s Reform Party went further, suggesting that Chretien and Charest should be disqualified from national leadership because they were Quebeckers.

Charest replied by calling Manning a “bigot,” and McDonough accused the Reform leader of taking the path toward civil war. Commentators said Manning, who borrows many of his ideas and campaign tactics from U.S. Republicans, had become the first national politician to openly exploit anti-Quebec prejudice.

“Canadians are now being treated to the darkest underbelly of American campaign dirty tricks, the hot buttons, code words, wedge issues, single issues and attack ads of the win-by-any-means and at-any-cost school,” wrote columnist Frances Russell in the Winnipeg Free Press. “. . . [Manning] is the only leader of a major political party ever to play fast and loose with the nation’s most fragile fault line.”

Manning’s tactic also appeared to work with voters. Once he shifted his campaign theme from cutting taxes and reducing the size of government to Quebec, Reform’s poll numbers began to rise.