ON THE surface, the outcome of Canada's federal election on May 2nd looked like a vote for continuity. Stephen Harper's (left, above) Conservatives, who have held power for five years, were easily reelected and will stay in government until 2015. Yet even though the prime minister will not change, the election represents the biggest realignment of Canadian politics since 1993.

After falling short of a majority in 2006 and 2008, the Conservatives are now comfortably in control, with 167 of the House of Commons' 308 seats. The proud, centrist Liberals, who once called themselves the “natural governing party of Canada”, were decimated, reduced from 77 seats to 34, while Quebec's separatist Bloc Québécois was all but eliminated, collapsing from 47 seats to four. Both parties' leaders lost their own seats. The beneficiary of their woes was the leftish New Democratic Party (NDP), a perennial also-ran that soared from 36 seats to 102, and now finds itself as the official opposition. After years of muddled multi-party politics, Canada now looks much more like Britain, with a clear ideological right-left divide between its two most powerful parties, and a third party—Canada's Liberals and Britain's Liberal Democrats—stranded in the mushy middle.

Mr Harper had long sought to move Canada towards a two-party system, but the election was not of his choosing. The three opposition parties toppled his government with a no-confidence vote on March 25th, after a parliamentary committee found the Conservatives in contempt for refusing to divulge the cost of various plans, including buying fighter jets and building new prisons. Once into the fray, however, the prime minister made a majority his central issue, telling voters that the hyper-partisan parliament had become dysfunctional, and that a country still recovering from recession needed stability.

Parliament will indeed become more functional now, because a majority in Canada gives the prime minister near-absolute power—especially if his party also controls the unelected Senate, as the Conservatives do. In his victory speech, Mr Harper said he would proceed with all of his contentious initiatives from the previous parliament, including bundling his tough-on-crime legislation into a single, omnibus bill and reintroducing a budget that envisages further corporate tax cuts.

The opposition to the Conservatives will probably become fiercer even as it is less effective. While the Liberals, a big-tent party, shared some common ground with the Conservatives on economic policy, the NDP—a collection of unionists, farmers and now soft Quebec nationalists with socialist leanings—disagrees with them on just about everything. On climate change, for example, the NDP wanted to institute a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, an anathema in the carbon-belching tar sands of Alberta, Mr Harper's home base. The day after the election, the prime minister said that “westerners can breathe a lot easier” because voters had rejected his rivals' energy proposals.

The fireworks are not likely to start at once. Jack Layton (right, above), the NDP's leader, must first come to grips with his greatly enlarged caucus, which went from one MP in Quebec to 58. The orange wave in that province brings a motley group of students, ex-Communists, teachers, activists and a few seasoned politicians to Ottawa. Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the victorious candidate in Berthier-Maskinongé, is not fluent in French, and spent part of the campaign in Las Vegas on a holiday that was planned before the election was called.

The Liberals will be preoccupied with replacing their leader, Michael Ignatieff, who said on May 3rd that he would quit. His decision to force the election now looks like an epic blunder. Using the slogan “Just Visiting”, the Conservatives typecast him as an opportunist who had returned to Canada in 2005 in pursuit of personal glory. He awkwardly campaigned from the centre even as Canadian politics becomes increasingly ideological, and his calls to defend democracy sounded vague compared with his opponents' crisper promises. The principal decision awaiting his successor is whether to negotiate a merger with the NDP, uniting the left just as Mr Harper did the right in 2003, or to try to regroup alone in order to hold the middle ground, as Mr Ignatieff recommends.

The obliteration of the Bloc Québécois suggests that Quebeckers want a greater say in Canada's national political discussion, after years of voting for a separatist party that delivered few tangible benefits. That should make the country far easier to govern, and reduce resentment of Quebec in other provinces. But it is too early to pronounce separatism dead: the Parti Québécois, the Bloc's provincial equivalent, remains the most popular party in Quebec and would win if a provincial election were called today. That is one of the very few aspects of Canadian politics that did not change on May 2nd.