CANADA DIVIDING ITSELF

By ANDREW PURVIS/OTTAWA

The campaign advertisement was designed to push buttons, and it did. Framed in tight close-up were four politicians from Canada's mainly French-speaking province of Quebec, including the incumbent Prime Minister, Jean Chretien. A red line slashed across their faces. Wasn't it time that voters heard a voice for "all Canadians" and "not just Quebec politicians?" asked the narrator. Incensed Quebeckers charged the sponsors of the ad, the western-based Reform Party, with bigotry and racism. In the west, by contrast, the message struck a sympathetic chord. The Reform Party went on to capture 60 seats in Parliament, second only to Chretien's victorious Liberals.

The ad and last week's election dramatized a new deterioration in Canadian political life. The new Parliament is more regionally Balkanized than at any other time in the country's 130-year history. The Reform Party nearly swept the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia but failed to pick up a single seat east of the Prairies. In Quebec the separatist Bloc Quebecois took a majority of the 75 seats in its home province. And even Chretien's Liberals depended for two-thirds of its majority on a single province, Ontario. The new fault lines could not come at a worse time. Quebec separatist leaders have sworn to hold a referendum on independence within two years.

Prime Minister Chretien is already blamed by opponents for coming within 50,000 votes of "losing the country" in the last referendum, in 1995. His government has attempted to promote the idea of Canadian unity in Quebec and has tried to persuade the country's provincial leaders to recognize Quebec as a "distinct society" in the country's constitution. "It's a question of dignity," Chretien told TIME last week. "The fact that 85% of Quebeckers speak French is not a concept. It's a reality."

But such a change would require the consent of voters in western Canada. There the Reform Party leader, Preston Manning, campaigned specifically against such constitutional recognition for Quebec. In Canada's new Parliament, that position is likely to gain currency. "We have seen the true face of the rest of Canada, and it is Preston Manning," said a former Quebec politician last week.

With Manning's party the official opposition, many are worried that his hardball tactic will only galvanize nationalist sentiment in Quebec. Canada is without a truly national political party to bridge the deepening regional divides, creating the fear that it is a country slowly falling apart.

--By Andrew Purvis/Ottawa