-- Marshal Foch.

Well, we didn't make the front page of the New York Times: bumped by a story on the rise of decimal pricing on American stock exchanges.

Apparently the Election that Changes Everything does not seem quite so cataclysmic to the rest of the world.

It is in many ways an excellent result, not least for the governing Liberals, majority intact despite the mugging they were given in the regions: not quite a drinking majority, as the British say, but a majority for all that. This is as it should be. A minority government, given the coming upheavals in Quebec, would have been perilous; a larger majority, meaning many more Liberals from the west, and the government might have been tempted to try something cute with the constitution.

At least we can breathe easy on that score. Unless Preston Manning gets the urge to be statesmanlike, there is no prospect of distinct society or anything like it being foisted upon the country again. By electing 60 Reform M.P.s, western Canada has slammed the door, firmly and finally, on the strategy of appeasement. After more than thirty years of feeding federal powers, piece by piece, into the gaping maw of Quebec nationalism, the government of Canada may at last be forced to stop begging for the right to exist.

This isn't only about Quebec. It cannot have escaped notice that, after all the many steps this government, like the ones before it, has taken to dismantle itself, the country is more divided than ever. After handing control of the fisheries to the government of British Columbia, after yielding up job training and immigration to Quebec -- oops, Quebec-and-every-other- province -- after promising it would never bring in another social program the provinces don't like, after granting every stray dog a constitutional veto, the Liberals have succeeded in electing four regional protest parties to Parliament.

Perhaps this regional gridlock is no coincidence. I don't subscribe to Alexa McDonough's theory that the crisis of national unity can be put down to a shortage of licenced day-care spaces. But if by its every move the federal government seems to deny its own legitimacy, if it forever stoops rather than offend the imperial provinces, it places all further debates about the shape of the federation on a foundation of instability.

The federal government is the only government of all Canadians. The very existence of a federal government, as distinct from those of the provinces, presupposes a Canadian nation, a single self-governing body of citizens from which it derives its sovereignty and to which alone it is answerable. If it is unwilling or unable to act without the provinces' say-so -- if it has, or seems to have, no independent role but that the provinces assign it -- then the implication is inescapable: that there is no Canadian nation, but only the peoples of the several provinces.

Explicitly or implicitly, that is what Canadians have been told for thirty years -- not only in Quebec, but in the rest of Canada. The message is reinforced in every academic treatise on "asymmetric federalism," every insolent communique from a premiers' conference, every back-pedalling federal effort to prove that "Canada works." Thus devolution feeds upon itself. People are naturally disinclined to submit to the rule of others, with whom they have been told they have no community of interests or values.

Not being part of the same nation -- there being no such thing -- they will reject national institutions, including national parties. The result is what we have today: a House divided.

If we are to prevent this spiral into insignificance, federalists can no longer afford merely to contain the devolutionist-separatist juggernaut, offering concessions here and there in hopes of taking the steam out of it. We must instead roll back the frontier: a bold federal counter-offensive that would insist, without apology, on the legitimacy of federal authority -- and by extension, the existence of the Canadian nation. You might see this as a deliberate attempt to pick a fight with the provinces. I prefer to call it a policy of, to borrow a phrase, "national affirmation." Fortunately, the current parliament presents just such an opportunity.

The weakness of the government's position is a hidden source of strength: it has the element of surprise on its side, for starters, and can hardly be accused, beset as it is on all sides, of picking on any one region. At the very least, it has nothing to lose.

And in the platforms of the opposition parties, it has a chance to ground the federal counter-attack in that fine old Liberal tradition: stealing your opponents' policies. More on this next time.