By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 4, 1997; Page A26

They may have had different reasons for doing it in different parts of the country, but Canadian voters could hardly have delivered a more confusing message in Monday's national legislative election. They chose five different parties to represent Canada's five regions.

With a slim governing majority based overwhelmingly in Ontario, Prime Minister Jean Chretien welcomed what he described as a historic second mandate, the first time Canada's Liberals have won consecutive majorities since the early 1950s.

That in itself is a substantial feat, Liberal supporters said, after a first term in which the government reduced spending and tightened the eligibility rules for popular social programs such as health care, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions.

"Majorities in Canada back to back are a challenge; we met it," said John Rae, the Liberals' national campaign coordinator.

Even though his party lost support in Monday's voting and only narrowly held control of the House of Commons, Chretien said the Liberals alone now can claim standing as a party that represents all of Canada. The Reform Party, with the second-largest number of seats, failed to win any east of Manitoba despite intense campaigning in Ontario by party leader Preston Manning.

"It's a great moment," Chretien said of a vote that gave his party 155 of the 301 available seats. "We won a majority, and we have seats in all parts of Canada."

But just barely.

In the eastern provinces, where the Chretien government's budget-cutting hit hard, the Progressive Conservatives, Canada's traditional Tory party, emerged with the largest number of seats. Quebec, meanwhile, elected more members of the separatist Bloc Quebecois than any other party, denying Chretien and Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest the large gains they had expected.

Ontario went overwhelmingly for the Liberals, giving them 101 of 103 seats and providing a foundation for Canada's governing party in the province that has perhaps the deepest ties to traditional Canadian federalism.

The prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan helped restore the fortunes of the labor-based New Democratic Party; along with British Columbia and Alberta, they also helped make the conservative Reform Party the official opposition – replacing the Bloc Quebecois – with 60 seats in the upcoming Parliament.

Like Chretien, the leaders of the four other parties could all claim satisfaction with the results. But they also acknowledged that the divisions in Canadian society remain: Chretien's Liberals may have won a majority, but they received less than 40 percent of the popular vote, and two-thirds of their delegation comes from one province, Ontario. That, opposition leaders said today, is hardly an expression of national will.

At a news conference in Montreal, Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe predicted Monday's vote will be the last federal election held in this province, as Quebec's French-speaking nationalists prepare for a provincial election expected to be called in coming months, and then another referendum on whether to leave Canada and form their own country.

The Bloc, which fields candidates only in Quebec, won 44 of that province's 75 seats. Although it drew only 40 percent of the popular vote in the province, Duceppe said the sovereignty movement is confident of winning the next referendum.

Monday's results helped that cause, he said, particularly western Canada's strong vote in favor of the Reform Party, which is being portrayed by separatists as evidence of widespread anti-French sentiment in English Canada. Of all the other party heads, Manning spoke most bluntly about Canada's need to be more aggressive in opposing Quebec nationalism.

"An anti-Quebec party forms the official opposition. . . . There is a government with its power based in Ontario," Duceppe said. "The best way for each of us to build our own nation is to build a new partnership agreement. . . . We will be talking about this every day."

Regional divisions in Canadian politics are nothing new, nor are governments with slim majorities, said Desmond Morton, director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at Montreal's McGill University.

The Liberal governments of Prime Minister Lester Pearson in the 1960s also had little luck winning votes in the western provinces and survived as a minority in alliance with the New Democratic Party, Morton said. Even the first term of the popular Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1968 began with his party's being shut out in Newfoundland.

What might be different this time, Morton said, is the role that ideology – from separatism in Quebec to Reform's demand for "equality of provinces" – played in this election, in contrast with Chretien's managerial style of politics.

With the Bloc Quebecois and Reform Party each presenting conflicting views of the country, and doing so in a way that continues attracting voters, it may be difficult for Chretien to develop any national accord on Quebec before another sovereignty vote.

"This isn't what you want for Christmas," Morton said.