My Little Corner of Canada: Election ’97

JOHN AMAGOALIK

There was a time when the Liberals regularly won elections by capturing almost all the seats in Quebec. Those days are gone. Now, the Liberals have moved their fortress next door to Ontario. Jean Chrétien and his Liberals won a majority in the House of commons by winning 101 of the 103 seats in Ontario.

Preston Manning and the Reform Party are now the official opposition. That was one of the party’s objectives. The other objective ­ being a national party ­ was not achieved. They could not break through the Manitoba/Ontario border. All Reform seats are still from the West. Some Reformers will start thinking about finding a new leader if they are to expand to central and eastern Canada.

The Bloc Québécois was lucky to win 44 seats in Quebec. The separatist party ran a poor campaign but got an unexpected boost from questionable campaign advertising by the Reform camp. The Bloc will no longer be the official opposition and they can be expected to be much more nasty in the House of Commons. Gilles Duceppe will continue to be a weak leader.

Alexa McDonough and the New Democratic Party were not supposed to do this well. People thought they would be lucky to get between 12 and 15 seats and regain offical party status. They got 21 seats and will return to the House with renewed energy. A lot of eyes will be on McDonough for a while to see how she performs.

The most frustrated party leader has to be Jean Charest. He was the most popular of the individual party leaders. But this did not translate into seats. The Tories won 20 per cent of the popular vote and got 20 seats. The Reform Party got just 17 per cent of the popular vote and got 60 seats. The NDP got only 11 per cent of the popular vote and got 21 seats.

Mr. Charest, who called Preston Manning a bigot in the last days of the campaign, must now engage in a life-and-death struggle with the Reform Party in the House of Commons. Jean Chrétien, in his victory speech, made a special effort to praise Mr. Charest. The prime minister knows that Mr. Charest was a powerful force for the federalists in the last Quebec referendum and that he will need him in the next one.

The Little Guy from Shawinigan has done it again. He is the first Liberal prime minister to win back-to-back majorities in 44 years. But Mr. Chrétien is starting to look a little tired. This Little Corner predicts that, in January of 2000, Jean Chrétien will take a walk in a snowstorm and return to tell his wife Aline that he has decided to…

Our man Bailey

It was no contest. Michael Johnson knew, about half way through Sunday’s race, that Donovan Bailey was going to embarrass him so he got “hurt” and couldn’t continue the race. I guess we’ll never know for sure about his injury, but we do know that Michael Johnson is not the world’s fastest human.