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Canada's Progressive Conservative Party faced the prospects of electoral annihilation going into the 2000 election. In the 1993 election, the party suffered what must surely be the most humiliating defeat ever visited upon an incumbent party; its share of the popular vote plummeted from 43% to 16% and it was reduced to a mere two seats (1%, down from 57%). So complete was the collapse that the party-one of the two parties that had alternated in power since Confederation in 1867-lost its official status in the House of Commons.1 Meanwhile, the new party of the Right - the Reform Party-managed to get 19% of the vote and, thanks to the concentration of its support in western Canada, this translated into 52 seats.2
With 19% of the popular vote and 20 seats, the Conservatives were able to regain official party status in the 1997 federal election, thanks in good measure to their new leader, Jean Charest.1 But the Reform party also made some progress: with just over 19% of the vote, but 60 seats, it did well enough to form the official opposition.4 Three years later, in hopes of increasing its support in central and eastern Canada, the Reform Party reconstituted itself as the Canadian Alliance.5
There was little doubt which party would win the 2000 election. On the eve of the campaign, the incumbent Liberals enjoyed a huge 20-point lead over the Canadian Alliance (45% against 25%). The real stakes of the 2000 election concerned the outcome of the "fight for the Right" between the new Alliance Party and the old Progressive Conservative Party: which of these two parties would succeed in establishing itself as the party of the Right?
With their support standing at below 10%, the challenge for the Conservative Party was to win at least 12 seats in order to retain official status in the House of Commons. For the Alliance, meanwhile, the challenge was to make some additional gains and, more importantly, to broaden its support by making inroads in Ontario, Canada's most populous province, where Reform had failed to win a single seat in 1997. An Alliance breakthrough in Ontario would lie to rest the charge that the new Right party was just another western-based protest movement. By winning seats...