ELECTORAL DISCONTINUITY - THE 1993 CANADIAN FEDERAL-ELECTION

The 1993 Canadian General Election was an extraordinary one. The elect ion featured the collapse of a once stable two-party-plus party system and the emergence of a less stable one-party dominant system. The gov erning Progressive Conservative party went down to the most crushing d efeat of any governing party in Canadian electoral history, and two ne w parties displaced two old ones. This article places this dramatic fr acturing in the context of Canadian post-war electoral history. It dra ws upon well-known perspectives on spatial theory to illustrate how on e new party, the Reform Party, captured the political right. It then d emonstrates how the strategic interests of both of the two new parties , Reform and the independent Bloc Quebecois, combined to undermine the integrative role that Canadian political parties have traditionally s erved. We argue that the present one-party dominant system is unstable and, after speculating about how the Canadian party system may return to a stable alignment, we consider the broader implications of the el ection outcome.