The Liberal Party, as predicted, easily dominated voting in Ontario yesterday, marking the third consecutive federal election in which its hegemony in Canada's largest province assured it control of the House of Commons.
The Liberals won almost all 103 seats in the province and took about half the votes cast.
The Canadian Alliance failed to achieve its goal of making a significant breakthrough in Canada's largest province.
The New Democratic Party and the Progressive Conservatives ended up on the sidelines.
However, the Tories' success in capturing blocks of votes in Ontario ensured there will be new efforts to unite the province's right-wing voters under a single party in an attempt to challenge the Liberals' control.
The Liberals' triumph in Ontario included the victory of star candidate John McCallum over Jim Jones in Markham. Mr. Jones had been the only Alliance MP when the vote was called last month. He had switched to the Alliance after having been the only Tory elected in Ontario in the 1997 election.
The Canadian Alliance evolved out of the Reform Party largely as an effort to capture seats in Ontario by providing an option for voters seeking a conservative alternative to the Liberals.
With more than one-third of the seats in the House of Commons, success in Ontario is vital for any party seeking to form a government. And the Liberals' dominance in the province was the major reason the party formed majority governments in 1993 and 1997.
But like the Reform Party before it, the Alliance failed to convince voters in Ontario that it would provide them with better representation than the Liberals, even if most Liberal MPs are destined to be backbenchers who are seldom heard from.
The Liberals were determined to win back Mr. Jones's Markham seat and parachuted in Mr. McCallum, a well-known economist for the Royal Bank of Canada who spent much of the campaign defending the Liberals' economic policies, including the retention of the GST.
Liberal strategists were also keen to defeat Independent MP John Nunziata in York South-Weston. He had been elected repeatedly as a Liberal, starting in 1984. He won re-election as an Independent in 1997 after he was thrown out of the Liberal Party for voting against the government because of its failure to keep its promise to get rid of the GST.
Along with Mr. Jones, Mr. Nunziata was one of only two non-Liberals elected in Ontario in 1997, which gave 101 of its 103 seats to the Liberals.
That was a slightly poorer showing for the Liberals than in 1993, when they captured 102 of the seats.
To fight Mr. Nunziata, the Liberals sent veteran local politician Alan Tonks into the York South-Weston riding and held a quick nomination meeting to avoid a challenge from another candidate, such as prominent provincial Liberal Mike Colle.
On the left, the New Democrats were also hoping for a bit of a breakthrough, although their most optimistic hopes topped out at about six seats. Electing an Ontario MP was seen as important for the NDP as it was shut out in the province in both 1993 and 1997.
As a province with strong unions and enough of a leftish electorate to have chosen an NDP government at the provincial level in 1990, Ontario might have been seen as a place for the New Democrats to retain a small beachhead.
But the Liberals drew many potential NDP voters by portraying the election as a choice between itself and the unacceptable forces of the political right.
In Sault Ste. Marie, the NDP had an especially strong candidate. Bud Wildman held the seat provincially from 1975 until he resigned from the legislature before the 1999 provincial election.
He was soundly defeated last night by Liberal candidate Carmen Provenzano.