When she succeeded longtime Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and assumed office on 25 June, the party was deeply unpopular due to the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords in 1990 and 1992, respectively, the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax in 1991, and the early 1990s recession.

This coalition helped him win reelection in 1988 (an election almost wholly focused on the proposed Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement) but with only a minority of the votes cast this time.

This stinging rebuke against the "political class" in Canada was a preview of things to come, as the upcoming election would be held on October 25, 1993, a year less a day after the Charlottetown referendum.

While John Turner and the Liberal leadership supported the Meech Lake Accord, there was significant internal disagreement, with Trudeau returning from retirement to speak out against it.

The federal Liberals were disorganized, near bankruptcy, and dropped in the polls from 50 to 32 per cent, so Chrétien appointed Jean Pelletier as chief of staff to reinvigorate his leadership and reorganize his office.

[14] As the ruling Tories suffered the most backlash from the unsuccessful constitutional amendments in 1990 and 1992, the Liberals rapidly picked up support and surged to a wide lead in opinion polling.

As well, new leader Audrey McLaughlin made efforts to expand party support into Quebec instead of focusing on Western alienation, having defeated Dave Barrett, who had campaigned for the opposite policies.

After the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, Lucien Bouchard led a group of Progressive Conservative and Liberal MPs to form the Bloc Québécois.

Many Western voters had never forgiven the Liberals for the National Energy Program in the 1980s, and Mulroney's attempt to pacify Quebec caused them to rethink their support for the Tories.

This came as a considerable shock to the Tories, who had dominated Alberta's federal politics for a quarter-century, and as Grey had finished a distant fourth in the general election held a few months earlier.

The NDP (and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) had been the traditional Western protest party for most of the last 40 years, but since the 1990s, they had attempted to make inroads in Quebec and had joined the Progressive Conservatives and Liberals in supporting the Charlottetown Accord.

[15] Support for the Progressive Conservative Party had also increased after Campbell won the leadership, and their polling numbers were roughly equal to the Liberals, while Reform had been reduced to single digits.

Campbell was therefore seen as having a good chance of remaining in power if the Progressive Conservatives could at least finish with a similar number of seats to the Liberals, and that Reform would support a continuation of her government (likely in return for some concessions on fiscal policy) over one led by Chrétien.

Campbell denied the report and declared her sentence was distorted; her actual quote meant that 47 days were not enough to discuss the overhaul in social policy that she thought Canada needed.

Reform's support for populist policies, such as a democratically elected and regionally equal Senate and more plebiscites and referendums in the political process, was very popular in Western Canada.

These conservative voters were disenchanted with the PCs for imposing the Goods and Services Tax and failing to reduce Canada's growing deficit and national debt.

Reform had little money and few resources, with its candidates and campaign staff flying economy class, staying in cheap hotels, and relying on pre-packaged lunches, all which helped endear them to money-conscious fiscal conservatives.

[20] Reform found itself embroiled in controversy when Toronto-area candidate John Beck made a series of anti-immigrant remarks in an interview with Excalibur, the York University student paper.

Prior to the controversy, the Campbell Tories were already beset by many problems; notably the recession, the unpopular GST, and their support bases moving to Reform and the Bloc.

The heavy debt load would hamper the party's ability to campaign in subsequent elections, and this would lead to its eventual merger with Reform's successor, the Canadian Alliance.

The Liberals swept Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, with only Wayne's win in New Brunswick denying them a clean sweep of Atlantic Canada.

They also won all but one seat in Ontario; only a 123-vote loss to Reform's Ed Harper in Simcoe Centre denied the Liberals the first clean sweep of Canada's most populous province by a single party.

This was in part due to the staunchly federalist Chrétien's opposition to the Meech Lake Accord, which was revealed when leadership rival Paul Martin pressed him on the issue back in 1990.

Despite only running candidates in Quebec, the Bloc's strong showing in that province and the fragmentation of the national vote made them the second-largest party in the Commons and gave them Official Opposition status.

In one stroke, Reform had replaced the Progressive Conservatives as the major right-wing party in Canada (despite being virtually nonexistent east of Manitoba) and supplanted the NDP as the voice of Western discontent.

It is not likely they would have won any seats in Quebec in any case due to Manning's inability to speak fluent French, its uncompromising federalism, and opposition to official bilingualism.

One factor was the unpopularity of NDP provincial governments led by Bob Rae in Ontario and Mike Harcourt in British Columbia, which reflected badly on their federal counterpart.

Defeated Ontario MP Steven Langdon had called upon Rae to resign, having spent the 1993 election campaign disassociating himself from the provincial NDP's measures.

In 1989, while running for the federal NDP leadership, former British Columbia Premier Dave Barrett argued that the party should be concerned with Western alienation rather than focusing its attention on Quebec.

The NDP lost their only seat in the province, which it had gained in a 1990 by-election, as Phil Edmonston, a Quebec nationalist, opted not to see re-election because he disagreed with the party's support for the Charlottetown Accord.