If nothing else, this election should give more urgency to the cause of electoral reform. The people did not vote for a Parliament with no Conservative members west of Ontario and no Reformers east of it; they did not choose to give the Bloc Quebecois half the seats in Quebec and the Liberals nearly all the seats in Ontario. It is the electoral system, the first- past-the-post rule for deciding the winner in each riding, that has ghettoized our politics, generating sharp imbalances in regional representation out of all proportion to the parties' shares of the popular vote.

The distortions of first-past-the-post have been working their malignant way into the body politic for some time now, but never has its evil effects been more obvious than today. We are by nature a diverse, even divided country: but the electoral system accentuates these tendencies, rewarding parties, like Reform and the Bloc, that concentrate their votes in regional lumps, and punishing those, like the NDP and the Tories, whose support is spread more evenly across the country.

It discourages parties from taking a national view, encouraging instead the exploitation of regional grievances -- grievances to which the same electoral system, by shutting out one region or another from the councils of power, lend real substance. It thus displaces healthy ideological debate in favour of corrosive regional splits.

All the same, there are some clear patterns, both ideological and regional, that emerge from this election. For a start, we may now finally put to rest the myth of the three "right-wing" parties, a self-serving bit of NDP propaganda which too many lazy journalists have repeated as fact. If "right" and "left" have any meaning, they must be reckoned on some sort of useful ideological scale -- on which the NDP is hardly the Greenwich meridian.

If, as is common, we take left and right as proxies for more spending or less, with the status quo, wherever it may happen to be, as the moderate middle ground, then it is evident that we now have two parties to the left, the Liberals and the NDP, and two parties to the right: Reform and the Tories (the Bloc defies such categorization).

While the left, combining the votes cast for parties on either side, may be said to have won the election, of equal significance is the right's success in carving out its own electoral space, after four years in which the Grits seemed to occupy nearly the whole of the political spectrum.

Indeed, if we measure left and right relative to where the public is, the picture is even clearer. While the Liberals may still be considered "right- wing" in some circles for having cut federal spending 20 per cent, it is telling that some 40 per cent of the vote went to parties that would cut spending further yet -- much further. The "median voter," in political science parlance, is somewhere on the right wing of the Liberal party.

As such, this marks the final, incontrovertible endorsement of economic liberalism, after three elections in which the public's message has been more ambiguous. It was possible to argue, after the 1984 Tory landslide, that the public did not really intend anything more than to toss out a tired Liberal government; after the free-trade election of 1988, that a majority of the popular vote went to parties opposing the trade deal; after the 1993 rout, that the victorious Grits had at least given the impression of wanting to reverse the Mulroney government's policies.

But now the public's preferences are beyond dispute. Free trade, balanced budgets, price stability: these are no longer "right-wing" ideas. With the support of some 80 to 90 per cent of the voters, these are as much a part of the basic political vocabulary of the left in Canada -- the real left, the left as it has evolved everywhere else in the democratic world, not the pseudo-left that grandly declares, from its vantage point on the fringes of public debate, that everyone else is the "right." That said, there remain those troublesome regional divisions. Whatever the exaggerations of first-past-the-post, the election of more than 60 Reformers is unmistakable evidence of how little the traditional parties understand the west -- a conclusion reinforced by the hysteria that greeted Preston Manning's mild, if unsubtle, warnings that western Canada would not be quiescent spectators in any central Canadian power play over the constitution.

For now these tensions will continue to subsume all other disputes. A normal politics of ideology will not take hold in Canada until a way is found not merely to resolve the Quebec question, but to bring the other regions into the national debate.