Thursday, May 29 Canada began this election with only one national party. It has ended it with none. Barring a startling shift in opinion in the final days of the campaign, the Liberals will be returned to power on the strength of their support in just one province: Ontario. With a near sweep of the province's 103 seats anticipated, something like two-thirds of the Liberal caucus will likely be drawn from Ontario.

That, however, is merely to report results, rather than causes.

The real key to the party's success is to be found elsewhere -- as before, in Quebec. This will not be based on any significant breakthrough in the province the party once owned: it will be lucky to win 30 seats out of the province's 75. Rather, the decisive impact of Quebec on this election has been indirect, by way of the electors of Ontario.

That the Liberals, despite being shut out of all but about one-quarter of the seats outside Ontario, will nevertheless form a government is due entirely to the divisions among its rivals to the right. It isn't that there is any great wave of satisfaction washing across the country after three-and-a-half years of Liberal rule. With less than 40 per cent of the popular vote -- the lowest of any majority government in Canadian history, and about the same as the party obtained in losing back-to-back elections to Brian Mulroney -- the Grits can make no greater claim to popular affection than the two right-wing parties, Reform and the Conservatives, whose combined vote is about the same.

Statistics, as is well known, are for losers. The inability of the right to coalesce around one party is not trivial or accidental. It reflects a fundamental divide on a number of issues, but none more fundamental than what to do about Quebec. With Reform unable, as the embodiment of western Canada's opposition to appeasing Quebec nationalists, to win seats east of Manitoba, and the Tories equally confined, by virtue of their ardent courting of those same nationalists, to Quebec and Atlantic Canada, neither party can credibly present itself as a government in waiting.

That, even without the splitting of the vote in rural ridings that sent so many Ontario Liberals to Parliament the last time around, pretty well seals their fate. Quebec and the West may allow themselves the luxury of electing an opposition; Ontario elects a government. Indeed, if there is one thing this election has established, it is that the "unite the right" crusade must remain a fantasy. So long as Quebec is the central issue in Canadian politics, the right will be divided; so long as the right remains divided, it cannot win in Ontario; so long as it cannot win Ontario, it cannot aspire to power.

The Grits, it should be said, are not entirely the lucky beneficiaries of their opponents' misfortune that this account would suggest. By shifting so decisively towards economic liberalism, first by embracing free trade, then by the more remarkable expedient of the 1995 budget, the Liberals did more than split off votes from the right-wing parties: they robbed them of the glue that might have held them together, despite their differences -- the same factor that cemented the Mulroney coalition.

What is more, and very much to their credit, the Liberals have successfully split the difference between the two approaches to Quebec. In substance, the Liberals actually take a harder line towards secession than the supposedly divisive and confrontational Reformers: where Reform, for example, would accept a vote of 50 per cent plus one of Quebecers as decisive, the Liberals would not. At the same time, the Grits manage to *sound* as soft as the Tories, outside Quebec at least. Once again, this election has proved, it doesn't matter what you say, but how you say it.

As Europe was the undoing of Britain's Conservatives, so Quebec is to the right in Canada. Again, this is not accidental. Whether you take the Reform approach of hard bargaining on the terms of secession, or adopt the Tory policy of offering constitutional concessions to avert it, the two are united in the conviction that secession is a real and legitimate option for Quebecers.

Either strategy, threats or bribes, is equally predicated on the same basic idea: that there exist not one but two nations in Canada, whose identity is determined by their language and culture, and whose interests can at best be tenuously reconciled. The view that nations are not freely chosen, but forever fixed in culture or ethnicity, is a bedrock conservative belief.

It is the liberal ideal, of a political nation that transcends such differences, of a Canada that is indeed one nation, that is the true hope of national unity.

May it also prove to be the Liberal ideal.