But two polls released this week show Reform has pulled into a narrow lead.

The Zogby organization, whoever they are, gave the party 41 per cent of the vote, to 37 per cent for the Liberals. A Vancouver Sun poll put Reform's lead at 37-35. It's well within the margin of error, of course, but clearly all is not so quiet on the western front.

On the surface, the more surprising thing is that the Liberals should be doing so well in a province whose heraldic emblem is a chip rampant on a shoulder gules. Alienation is in the air in B.C., a generalized disaffection with all things federal that is the more potent for lack of any genuine grievances.

What, after all, are we to make of the long-running dispute over control of the fisheries -- an industry that, for all the attention devoted to it, accounts for precisely 0.4 per cent of provincial output? Admittedly the fisheries have been badly mismanaged under federal suzerainty. But there is no reason to believe they will be any better handled now that Ottawa, in a burst of pre- election generosity, has handed control over to the province.

Pressed to name a specific example of federal wrongdoing, the province's elite cadre of professional grumblers cite such crimes against humanity as the de-manning of lighthouses. All the same, the sense of marginalization is real enough, a feeling that B.C.'s priorities do not count in Ottawa, that its voice is not heard in an electoral system that is inevitably weighted toward the central Canadian bloc vote -- or indeed, Bloc vote.

Preston Manning skillfully tapped into this sentiment early in the campaign.

In a speech in Vancouver that resonated throughout the province, the Reform leader claimed "there is a political and economic stirring going on in B.C. which is as real and as potent as the stirring that occurred in Quebec in the 1950s and 1960s." If Ottawa does not respond, he said, "that stirring will produce strains on the federation as difficult as those being placed on it by Quebec." The analogy is of course preposterous. Whatever the changes that immigration may have brought to the urban face of B.C., they do not amount to another Quiet Revolution. However assertive the province's Pacific nationalists may have become, there is no serious prospect of a separatist movement arising in the west -- yet.

What there is, for the moment, is a sour mood, a dawning realization that the province is no longer the locus of opportunity, that indeed much of the economic boom of the early part of the decade was illusory. Economic growth in B.C. is projected to lag behind the rest of the country in 1997, for the third year in a row. While the population has been growing at 2.5 per cent per year, output has not kept pace: real per capita GDP has declined in three of the last four years.

All of which ought to mean more trouble for the federal Liberals than it has to date. Indeed, the province's major complaints seem tailor-made for Reform. B.C. suffers under the highest marginal tax rates, federal and provincial combined, in the country -- a matter of provincial policy, to be sure, but red meat for Reformers. The province also fares worst on most measures of violent crime. And, of course, there lurks always a simmering popular fury over the "unity" issue.

So far, however, the population seems oddly quiescent. If the Liberals can no longer dream of a breakthrough in the province, they seem likely to take a handful of seats from Reform in the more prosperous urban ridings in and around Vancouver, where Reform's cultural conservatism has never played well. The NDP, for their part, may take back one or two of their traditional downtown seats, to add to the two they won last time. The Conservatives are nowhere to be found.

Of the parties, however, only Reform would seem to have much room for growth. The Liberals are kept aloft mainly by the Prime Minister's high personal standing in the province: if that starts to erode, the voters' flirtation with the natural governing party will come to an abrupt end. The more the potential crisis in Quebec becomes an issue, the more they will look to representatives who will defend B.C.'s interests.

Another straw in the wind: the provincial government's constitutional adviser, Gordon Wilson, is preparing a report on the province's options should Quebec secede. His own expressed preference, if it came to that, is that B.C. should go its own way. For now, it is a fringe opinion. For now.