How dear and precious those days seem now.

For as long as the country seemed actually to be on the verge of disintegration, Canada's political culture looked as if it might rouse itself from the slough of cynicism and expediency into which it had sunk for so long, and to such ruinous depths. Indeed, what was remarkable about that era, in hindsight, was not how hard it was to turn things around, but how easy.

It only took one major effort at fiscal retrenchment, the 1995 budget, to wrench ourselves off the exponential path of rising indebtedness on which we were rocketing along to insolvency, and onto the "debt meltdown" track on which we are now embarked. What was hard was only putting aside the thirty-year habit of indulgence that got us there.

Likewise, the minute the federal government actually began to speak and act as if the country had a right to exist, a campaign that began shortly after the 1995 referendum and culminated in the Supreme Court reference on the legality of a unilateral secession bid, the separatists' inevitable rendez-vous with destiny no longer seemed quite so inevitable. Who knew? If you stopped behaving as if the country were a sort of ghastly disfiguring illness, to be treated with all manner of exotic therapies when it was spoken of at all, Quebecers would rediscover their own lingering sense of Canadianism. And they would do so almost immediately.

Yet it seemed that until and unless the destruction of the country was at hand, federalist politicians could not break themselves of the habit of arguing from separatist premises, whether by accepting the legitimacy of the secessionist project, or - what amounts to the same thing - by promising all sorts of constitutional concessions to avert it.

In those dear departed days, it was the Reform party that seemed best to represent the emergence of principle in Canadian politics. If their specific recommendations were not always wise, on the two great issues of the time they offered the clearest warnings of the perils to which our traditional politics were rapidly leading us, and the firmest resolve to change things. If in the end they only lent their backbones to the Liberals, that was service enough to earn the nation's thanks.

As I say, those days - roughly, from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 1997 - are gone. With the announcement that the deficit had been erased, as of the last budget, and with the precipitous drop in public support for separatism, both before and after Jean Charest's arrival on the Quebec political scene, the sense of crisis has eased. And with it has been jettisoned whatever pretense of principle might once have been in order.

Multi-billion-dollar military contracts are awarded to close political friends of the government without being put out to tender. The opposition, charging that the government lacks "compassion," bay for billions more to be spent on their pet causes, without regard for reason, precedent or the limits of the public purse. MPs of all parties plot to increase their pay, pensions and perqs. And as for Quebec, the talk is once again of constitutional change as the cure for all ills.

That the Liberals would revert to their old ways was wearisomely predictable: you could set your watch by it. What has been more dispiriting has been to watch Reform slide slowly into the same pit. And the surest proof of that has been the increasing respect accorded the party by the national media. No more the bumpkins, newly fallen off the turnip truck: they have learned how to play the game.

Perhaps we can afford the extra billions that Reform and its provincial confederates will wring out of the government to provide all-embracing, no- questions-asked compensation for victims of tainted blood. But we will pay a much steeper price in the erosion of what remained of fiscal discipline, not to say common sense, in Ottawa. It is telling, indeed, that the Liberals should take the heaviest opposition pounding on the one issue on which they have shown any principle of late.

Worse still have been Reform's embarrassing recent attempts to cozy up to Quebec nationalists. I don't say this is entirely unprincipled: Reform has always talked up its plan to hand powers to the provinces as a "troisieme voie" for Quebec, between separation and "federalism as it is." But it has never sounded quite so uncomfortably familiar. When Reform unity critic Rahim Jaffer told a roomful of Bloc Quebecois supporters in Quebec City this week that the constitution had been patriated in 1982 against Quebec's will, I swear I heard the voice of Brian Mulroney.

I know that's a dirty word in Canadian politics. So, it seems, is principle.