By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 31, 1997; Page A16

Canadian politicians, in constructing campaigns for this large but unevenly populated country, must appear to treat all provinces equally – never, for example, ignoring vote-poor areas like Prince Edward Island for fear of aggravating already profound regional jealousies.

So where did Prime Minister Jean Chretien focus the endgame of his campaign? In Ontario.

And Progressive Conservative Leader Jean Charest? Ontario.

Ditto for Reform Party Leader Preston Manning and, to a lesser extent, New Democratic Party head Alexa McDonough.

With parliamentary elections looming on Monday, they all passed through for the final act, acknowledging that while Canada is, on paper, a federation of 10 provinces, Ontario is first among equals when it comes to electing a government. Relatively dense, developed, and home to roughly one-third of Canada's 10 million people, it carries a weight far greater than that of any state or region in U.S. elections.

To win a majority in Parliament, a party must win here; one that wins big enough can assemble a majority with only modest support elsewhere.

That, in fact, is what polls indicate may happen to Chretien and the Liberals in the current campaign. Beset in the west, struggling in the east, Chretien's party is still expected to remain in power by dominating Ontario. The province has 103 of the country's 301 seats in Parliament, and the Liberals are projected to win 95 or more of them. They won 97 Ontario seats in 1993, when Chretien first became prime minister.

Indeed, if the Liberals don't achieve their expected near-sweep in Ontario, it could force them to form a minority government, and perhaps call another election if that proves unworkable.

"You eventually have to make a base in Ontario" if you hope to govern Canada, said Line Maheux, a spokeswoman for the Reform Party.

The stakes are just as high here for the other parties which, with little chance of forming the next government, at least want second-place status as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

Charest's Tories were decimated in 1993. They won only two seats, not even enough to earn official party status in Parliament. They may again be headed for only token representation, centered in Quebec and the eastern provinces, absent a resurgence in Ontario. The once influential New Democratic Party, product of Canada's left-leaning prairie populism, is similarly marginalized around a base in Saskatchewan.

As the voice of western discontent in Alberta and British Columbia, the Reform Party likewise can't claim anything other than regional status unless it breaks through in Ontario. Much of Reform's campaign has been designed around that reality, as the party tries to sell its recipe of tax cuts, government decentralization and a hard line on Quebec separation to suburban and rural voters throughout the province.

To farmers and country dwellers sprinkled around Ontario's vast landscape, Reform has emphasized its opposition to gun control. In the so-called "905 belt," the area code for Toronto's suburban sprawl, Reform has courted the hundreds of thousands of apartment and subdivision dwellers with promises to get tough on crime, cut taxes and not coddle Quebec sovereigntists.

The party's message nearly worked in 1993. Reform finished second, sometimes closely so, in more than 50 Ontario districts, and garnered more than 1 million votes throughout the province. In Canada's winner-take-all system, the challenge facing the right wing is to avoid a split among conservative voters between Reform and the Tories, and consolidate in a way that can challenge the Liberals.

The results will have ramifications beyond the mere choice of a prime minister. Reform's Manning, for example, contends that Canada's regional discord, whether manifested by French separatism in Quebec or feelings of isolation in the west, won't be resolved until Ontario opts for something other than the "status quo federalism" of the Liberal and Tory parties. A representative of Quebec, similarly, argued that Reform's stark rhetoric about separatism – party ads suggest the rest of Canada would be better served by someone other than a Quebecer like Chretien at its head – gives Canada's English-speaking majority, based in Ontario, a chance to show its "true face."

So far, that face remains little changed from the last election, and those familiar with Ontario politics say the tendency of voters here to avoid the perceived extremes works against any radical change.

Politics here is still dominated by the founding facts of the country, and by Ontario's central status as the seat of English Canadian history and influence. Where regional complaints are stoking opposition elsewhere, Ontarians take a more broadly national view and see little to complain about in the Liberal's deficit-cutting economic policies or moderate line on Quebec, said Graham White, a University of Toronto political scientist and expert on Ontario politics.

"Because of its size and wealth and literally central position, people in Ontario tend to have a more national view," White said. "It is a certain, imperial, Canada-is-Ontario-extended point of view."

And little wonder. Canada has worked well for Ontario, the province that boasts the country's most diversified economy and, because of its size, the most resilience to the types of pressures that influence politics in the other provinces.

Trouble in a single industry, like cod fishing, can ruin a province like Newfoundland, and confound the governing party at election time, as it is the Liberals this year. Immigration patterns that provoke racial tensions in less populous British Columbia are welcomed in Ontario as adding spice to the cultural mix, rather than upending it. Government intrusion into agricultural markets might rankle in Alberta, but means little here. Federal policies such as support for Canadian culture most directly help Ontario because this is where, at least on the English side, production companies and publishers are based; economic ties with the United States, expanded under free-trade treaties in the 1980s, have for decades fueled such major Ontario job creators as the auto industry.

Even the contentious question of Quebec separation has a different hue in Ontario, one framed by the two neighbors' partnership as Upper and Lower Canada in colonial times. Many French and English Quebecers have migrated to Ontario, and there is, generally, less anxiety over accommodating French Canada's concern over its future in North America.

On Election Day, that is all likely to spell good news for Chretien and the Liberals who, mostly on the basis of strength in a single powerful province, will probably be left as Canada's only remaining national party.

"Canada is a big country," said Liberal Party spokesman Sean Kirby. "We are just happy that our campaign seems to be resonating" in Ontario.