...Following the 1988 election, the Liberals had been reduced to a minority government despite losing the national popular vote due to their overwhelming strength in Quebec, something that concerned Prime Minister MacEachan. His attempts to broaden the party's reach to appeal to westerners and Ontarians was quickly scuttled when the New Democrats elected Dave Barrett from British Columbia as their new leader, replacing longtime leader Ed Broadbent. Barrett had rejected calls from others in the party to attempt to break the Liberals' stranglehold of Quebec and instead focused on keeping the NDP as the main protest party of the western provinces.
Well short of a majority and with several of his cabinet ministers making plans to challenge his leadership, MacEachan called for an election in April 1990, hoping that Progressive Conservative leader John Crosbie's outspoken nature would give voters pause with putting the PCs back into power.
Despite the relatively small swing from the election, the large amounts of seats the Liberals had hung on to by thin margins flipped to the PCs in 1990, giving Crosbie the prime ministry and a majority of 18 seats. The appearance of the right-wing Reform Party in Alberta, which won 2 seats, was viewed with suspicion and Crosbie would attempt throughout the life of the parliament to make western conservatives feel at home in the party.
Crosbie's ascension to power had caused a resurgence of Francophone concern in Quebec owing to Crosbie's dismissive responses to his lack of knowledge of French and past opposition to official bilingualism. The Liberals, under new leader Jean Chrétien, attempted to turn this to their advantage, but Quebec leaders, seeing the attention that Reform had brought to the west, instead realized that the Liberals had begun to take Quebec for granted and Chrétien's own unpopularity in the province compounded this sentiment. Jacques Parizeau and other Parti Québécois party officials then gave their official blessing to the creation of the Union du Québec, a federal party that while not necessarily aiming for an independent Quebec, would advocate exclusively for Quebec's interests and seek to keep both provincial rights as well as the protections for the French language that had been won during the constitutional patriation.
Despite his own socially liberal actions (including privately ensuring that gay candidates would get a fair shake at PC nominating conventions, and having a record number of women in his cabinet), Crosbie's "politically incorrect" language became a severe liability as the 1994 campaign got underway. Several statements he had made, especially towards female Liberal MPs, had been viewed as patronizing, which cost the PCs among women voters. For his part, Chrétien's problems with several prominent Liberals (such as former Minister of Justice and now-Senator John Turner) who viewed him as an electoral liability and who continued to work to pick candidates more in the mold of his predecessor, MacEachan.
Reform and Union du Québec (UDQ) won two seats apiece, but their influence on the election was huge. Reform's presence caused several seats in Alberta and British Columbia to flip to the NDP while UDQ votes caused some Liberal seats to swing to the PCs. Chrétien's problems with some members of his party were revealed by post-election polling to be far less of a concern in voter's minds than Crosbie's controversial statements and, with an election expected to be held in 1996, Liberals were confident that even with Chrétien at the helm, the party would retake control.
Indeed, things seemed to be headed in that direction. Crosbie's popularity continued to fall unabated across many demographics: westerners, women, Francophones and urban Ontario, after he remarked that Canadians from Ottawa and Toronto were less well-liked in his native Newfoundland than Americans, not bothering to say he disagreed. Despite having a popular program among his caucus (including criminal justice reform, relaxing long arms gun control laws and introducing business tax breaks), Crosbie came under increasing pressure to resign, as evidence mounted that his unpopularity would sink the PC hopes for the next election.
The prime minister headed off talks of a leadership review by announcing in March 1995 that he would resign pending the election of his successor. The Progressive Conservatives were then handed a savior when Perrin Beatty, who had long been talked up as a potential PC leader, announced his candidacy and subsequently won. Beatty took over for Crosbie in January 1996, and spent the rest of the year prior to the election doing damage control, especially among female voters and westerners. The Liberals and NDP were content to let Beatty work overtime to prevent an electoral disaster and thus only seriously begun campaigning when a new election was announced for September. But soon, panic began to set in as internal polls showed that more and more voters were returning to the PC fold after the replacement of Crosbie and the Liberals and NDP could only watch as Beatty led his party to first place early on in the campaign and stayed there.
The results of the 1996 election were a shock to Canadians who, only two years earlier, had predicted that Reform and the UDQ had begun a process of regional breakdown and protest parties that would come to dominate Canada. Both minor parties lost their two seat caucuses and Reform leader Preston Manning would soon lose control over the party he had created during the next parliament. The New Democrats, however, were the biggest loser of the election, losing two-thirds of the entire caucus, including Barrett's own riding of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca. Chrétien, despite his party making gains, would resign as well after being blamed by Liberals for doing little to stop Beatty's miraculous turnaround of PC fortunes.
With a majority, Beatty turned his attention to implementing his party's agenda. With the election of Pete Wilson in the United States later that year, Beatty had a friendly partner to the south and relations between the United States and Canada improved greatly since the frosty relations that had been the norm following the differences between the two countries were made apparent during the free trade debate in the 1980s. Beatty, even more so than Wilson, was receptive to business' arguments in favor of a free trade deal and pushed strongly for a deal with the United States and Mexico. Wilson, however, was in his first term and was planning to use a free trade agreement as part of his re-election campaign that he believed would force Congress to go allow it to go forward should he win.
Canada, in this spirit of great relations with the US, contributed troops to MINUSTAC, with its Francophone soldiers being godsends to the UN commanders on the ground in the Congo, and among the most popular of the "blue helmets" to the Congolese there. Beatty had planned to call an election in 2000 with internal polls showing a continued PC majority, but the explosive revelations of the De Bané Commission (named after the Liberal senator leading it) that showed massive amounts of corruption in the PC's highly-touted Canadian Business Partnership Initiative (CBPI) that sought to streamline government and business cooperation, including large amounts of "pay to play" used by both government ministers and civil servants attached to the program as well as a litany of other financial transgressions. The backlash was tremendous and Beatty had no choice but to delay calling for a new election...
