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A crowd waves Quebec flags during the St. Jean Baptiste celebrations on the Plains of Abraham on June 23, 2009.Francis Vachon

Last week I gave a talk at the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, co-hosted by the department of political studies. One of the many remarkable achievements of the people of Saskatchewan is the founding and nurturing of this beautiful, world-class university, populated by bright, challenging students and a formidable faculty who ask tough questions in the nicest possible way.

Former premier Allan Blakeney attended. I told the audience that his advice and steady hand during last year's parliamentary crisis taught me directly why he was such an effective head of government.

Former premier Roy Romanow was there. I thanked him for his equally effective partnership on a number of recent adventures (including writing the foreword for a recent book). I noted that in my home, for many years, he was known by a compound word ("Dadthebossisonthephone").

In the 1970s my father used to lecture occasionally at the school of commerce at McGill University. Here I was at the University of Saskatchewan. It is thus now a tradition in my family to speak at universities that would never in a million years now admit us as students.

I was asked to talk about the roots and implications of the form of the current Parliament. Here is some of what I said.

The central fact of Canadian politics is that the Liberals used to win Quebec, and now they don't. Here in the blogosphere (as opposed to the lunchtime lectureosphere) we can look at the details, and here they are:

Federal election / Liberal leader / Liberal seats out of Quebec total

1891 / Laurier / 33 out of 65

1900 / Laurier / 57 out of 65

1904 / Laurier / 53 out of 65

1908 / Laurier / 52 out of 65

1911 / Laurier / 36 out of 65

1917 / Laurier / 62 out of 65

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1921 / King / 65 out of 65

1925 / King / 59 out of 65

1926 / King / 59 out of 65

1930 / King / 40 out of 65

1935 / King / 59 out of 65

1940 / King / 62 out of 65

1945 / King / 47 out of 65

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1949 / St-Laurent / 68 out of 75

1953 / St-Laurent / 66 out of 75

1957 / St-Laurent / 62 out of 75

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1958 / Pearson / 25 out of 75

1962 / Pearson / 35 out of 75

1963 / Pearson / 47 out of 75

1965 / Pearson / 56 out of 75

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1968 / Trudeau / 56 out of 75

1972 / Trudeau / 56 out of 75

1974 / Trudeau / 60 out of 75

1979 / Trudeau / 67 out of 75

1980 / Trudeau / 74 out of 75

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1984 / Turner / 17 out of 75

1988 / Turner / 12 out of 75

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1993 / Chretien / 19 out of 75

1997 / Chretien / 26 out of 75

2000 / Chretien / 36 out of 75

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2004 / Martin / 21 out of 75

2006 / Martin / 13 out of 75

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2008 / Dion / 14 out of 75

As Brian Mulroney used to tell his party, the Liberal lock on French Canada was the foundation of their hegemony. The Liberals have often been a minority party in English Canada. But for much of our history they have been able to count on substantially all of the roughly 100 seats French Canadians influence and, specifically, most of Quebec's seats. Now they can't.

The exceptions are instructive.

In 1958 the Liberals were begging to be defeated (pipeline debate; entitlement politics, etc. - it all sounds familiar). Particularly when standing in the University of Saskatchewan a few meters from John Diefenbaker's library and museum (and thus at some risk of being hit by lightning bolts from that direction), nothing should be taken away from Dief's 1958 achievement - cracking the Liberals in Quebec. He was a remarkable campaigner. It is also true that essentially all of the 50 Quebec Conservative MPs elected that year were figures drawn from the Union Nationale. Premier Maurice Duplessis could see Liberal vulnerability and put his shoulder (and the Union Nationale's shoulder) behind the Conservative campaign. In many ways the 1958 federal count in Quebec was the harvest of Duplessis's last campaign, fought through a surrogate.

In 1984 the underlying issue was the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Again, nothing should be taken away from Brian Mulroney's skills as a campaigner. Again, it is also true that premier Rene Levesque could see Liberal vulnerability and put his shoulder (and the Parti Quebecois' shoulder) behind the Conservative campaign. In some ways the 1984 Conservative victory in Quebec was therefore the harvest of Rene Levesque's own last campaign, once again fought through a surrogate.

In 1988 the issue was free trade. Both premier Robert Bourassa and opposition leader Jacques Parizeau favoured the free trade agreement with the United States (in Parizeau's case, baldly stating that the agreement would weaken Canada and its government and therefore would help break up the country, a good thing in Mr. Parizeau's view). And so Mr. Mulroney benefited from a political "consensus" in the Quebec National Assembly.

In other words, in the political world we used to live in, the Conservatives could beat the Liberals in Quebec -- provided the Liberals were begging to be defeated, and the Conservatives were working with the Union Nationale or the Parti Quebecois.

Now consider the post-1988 results, in the wake of the patriation of the Constitution and the Meech Lake Accord.

In all six elections since then (1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2008) the Liberals have been defeated by the Bloc Quebecois in the former Liberal fortress. Quebec's separatists no longer need to intervene in federal politics through surrogates. Instead, the Parti Quebecois has chartered a sock puppet (the Bloc Quebecois), and has played the absurdities of our electoral system with consummate skill to dominate federal politics in Quebec. In six elections, they have consistently won a federal MP for roughly every 30,000 votes, a highly efficient result (900,000 Green Party voters weren't rewarded with a single seat in the last federal election).

Again, the near-exception is instructive. In 2000 Jean Chretien won 36 Quebec seats, within a eyelash of a federalist majority. The issues were the record of the then-governing PQ government; opposition to Conservative economic and social policies; and the fundamental futility of sending the Parti Quebecois to Ottawa. Mr. Chretien then built on his support in Quebec when his government ratified the Kyoto Accord in December 2002 and choose, in March 2003, to keep Canada out of the Iraq war. These are an instructive set of issues for those of us looking for a way to change these patterns. But Mr. Chretien did not survive in office to consolidate those gains, and his feckless successor threw them away.

Despite the end of Liberal hegemony in Quebec, Mr. Chretien was able to govern with majorities in Parliament. He did this because of a unique and temporary set of circumstances in Ontario. The New Democrat vote was temporarily suppressed because the perceived and real record of premier Bob Rae's NDP government. Fortunately for the rising cause of social democracy in Canada, the viciously and poisonously personal Liberal door-stop campaigning against Mr. Rae that helped Liberals temporarily suppress the NDP vote in that province is no longer available to them, now that Mr. Rae has joined their team as a front-bench player and leadership candidate. Concurrently, Conservative Ontario was splitting its vote between the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party. They don't do that anymore.

Michael Ignatieff's current political team is steered by veterans of that historically unique moment of Liberal hegemony in Ontario - briefly echoing their former hold on Quebec. They seem to be blinded by it, hoping they will win again by replicating it. But as an independent liberal columnist in the Toronto Star remarked a few days ago, Mr. Ignatieff is not Jean Chretien. Recent polls suggest that Mr. Ignatieff is currently the least well-regarded federal leader in Parliament, despite months of uncritically favourable media coverage in the wake of Mr. Harper's second prorogation. Further, Ontario in 2010 is not Ontario in 1993. Given recent federal events, it's a good thing Mr. Ignatieff's folks delude themselves on these points. Otherwise they might think up something new, that might work.

So what? What does this all mean?

It means a very old pattern of Canadian federal politics is broken, at least for the time being, and has not been replaced by a new pattern that allows any of our three national political parties to win a parliamentary majority for very long. Like most western democracies, we therefore now have a multi-party Parliament and multi-party government in one form or another. For example, for this year and this budget, we have an informal Conservative-Liberal government -- apparently a loveless marriage.

Conceivably, things are going to stay that way for quite awhile.

These are the fundamental realities underlying last year's parliamentary crisis. And may be the bones of our future for some time to come.

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