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Much the same could be said of the two elections that followed. Did the Liberals win in 1997 because the right was divided, or because the conquest of the deficit, starting with the 1995 budget, took away the right’s biggest issue, and with it a chunk of its voting base? Did Jean Chrétien win again in 2000 because there were two conservative parties, or because one of them was led by Stockwell Day and the other by Joe Clark?

Also confounding the vote-splitting explanation: over much of the country the vote was not, in fact, split. East of Ontario, Reform was not a factor, even where it did run candidates, while West of Ontario, the Progressive Conservatives had all but ceased to exist: in 75 of 88 ridings in 1997, the Tories finished fourth or worse. Only in Ontario was vote-splitting even nominally an issue, and then only in about a third of the ridings.

That might still have been decisive. The Liberals won substantially all of the seats in Ontario in all three elections; if vote-splitting accounted for even a couple of dozen of those it might have been enough to make the difference, especially in 1997, when their majority was only four seats.

For this to hold, however, you have to assume the Conservative and Reform (or Canadian Alliance, in 2000) votes could simply be added together: that had there been only one party on the right, it would have sewn up all or nearly all of those votes. But this is far from clear. If it were only the Reform Party on the ballot, many traditional Ontario Conservatives would probably have defected to the Liberals; if it were only Clark’s Progressive Conservatives, many Reform-minded voters might have stayed home.