Whatever the precise result on Monday, and whoever forms a government, one thing should by now be clear: The political landscape of Canada is on the verge of historic change—radical, permanent, and mostly for the better. Eight decades of Liberal dominance, punctuated by occasional Tory interludes, are about to come crashing to an end. This isn’t 1984. It isn’t 1979. It isn’t even 1957. It’s something completely new.

It’s new, in part, because this Tory party is something we haven’t seen before. Previous Conservative uprisings have been rooted almost entirely in popular disgust with Liberal excess, and though that is partly true as well here, it isn’t the whole story. Previous Conservative leaders had no higher ambition than to govern in the Liberal mould, either out of sincere ideological conviction (Clark) or because they wanted to run the Liberal machine for themselves (Mulroney). This one wants to break the mould.

I don’t mean that only in a policy sense, though it is true that Stephen Harper has a very different philosophy of government than any previous Tory leader. But Mr. Harper, as people are learning, is also a supremely political animal, and his truer ambitions are to destroy the one-party system, forever: to set Canada permanently on a two-party track. He will push as far as he can in policy terms, and indeed will know the value of sharp policy distinctions as instruments of political gain. But if it comes to a conflict between the two—between advancing his own policy agenda and entrenching the Conservatives as permanent contenders for power—he will unhesitatingly choose the latter.

I have always believed he had a two-election strategy in mind—one to put them in contention, a second to vault them into power—even before the possibility of a minority government emerged. But he has been given a large assist by the sudden disintegration of the Liberal coalition, under the dual stress of the Adscam revelations and the long civil war within the party. Consider what has befallen the Liberals:

They have lost Quebec. The arrival of the Bloc Quebecois in 1993 removed any possibility of the near-sweeps the party enjoyed in the Trudeau era. But in this election the Liberals have lost not only the nationalist vote—they’ve lost the federalists. This is an event of historic significance, not only because the majority of Quebecers are federalists, but because they are a more stable political element: the foundation stone, indeed, of 80-odd years of Liberal hegemony.

For now they are parking their votes with the Bloc. But in the next election the Conservatives will come knocking.

Readers may want to familiarize themselves with a speech Mr. Harper gave in 2002 while campaigning for leader of the Canadian Alliance. The great mistake of previous conservative leaders, he said, was to align themselves with Quebec nationalists, in coalition with the traditional base of Western populists. This occasionally yielded great results—the Diefenbaker and Mulroney sweeps—but was inherently combustible, as subsequent events were to prove in either case.

Rather, Mr. Harper argued, Conservatives should aim for the federalist vote. “The broad lesson of history,” he noted, “is that Canada’s natural governing coalition always includes the federalist option in Quebec, not the nationalist one”—as was true of the Liberals for much of the 20th century, and of the Conservatives in the 19th. At the time, it seemed a long shot. But the federalist vote is in play now. The Liberals no longer own it. Indeed, under Mr. Harper’s leadership, the Conservatives, who tore themselves apart over Quebec for most of the past 40 years, are now both more united and more unambiguously federalist than the Liberals. The virus of special status—distinct society, deux nations, call it what you will—has been expunged from the party.

They have lost Ontario. Well, “lost” is perhaps overdoing it. But the province-wide sweeps of the Chretien years are a thing of the past. In part, this is simply a return to form: Rural Ontario was always decidedly strange turf for the Liberals. But something else is at work. Or rather two things. One, the immigrant vote is no longer reliably Liberal. Newer generations of immigrants are strongly entrepreneurial; many hold staunchly conservative views on social issues, such as the definition of marriage, as well.

And two, the province as a whole is shifting, if not exactly to the right, then to the West. This has been apparent at the provincial level for some years: The Harris Conservatives were indistinguishable from the Reform party federally, or the Klein Conservatives in Alberta. Ontario, once the placid home of Red Toryism and blinkered Upper Canadian supremacy, has increasingly absorbed the democratic values and free-market outlook of Western Canada. We are perhaps not there yet, but the day is not far off when the line dividing East from West will no longer be drawn at the lakehead, but at the Rideau. Which makes it all the more unfortunate for the Liberals that …

They have lost the West. They never had it, of course. But the Martin people were intensely interested in establishing a beachhead for the party in the West, knowing that the country’s political and economic centre of gravity is moving steadily westward. That dream is now over and, if it weren’t before, the anti-Alberta campaign of the past two weeks killed any hope of its revival.

All of this may seem too strong, coming three days before the election. But it is what comes after that may seal the Liberals’ fate. We can take it as a given that they will not win a majority. But it is not even clear that they can form a minority: The NDP will likely not be able to deliver enough seats to put them over the top, and the Bloc won’t play (and may not, depending on the numbers, be in a position to: e.g. 95 Liberals, 55 Bloquistes). And if it is a Tory minority, it is clear what their legislative agenda will be: to enact, with the enthusiastic support of the other opposition parties, a series of sweeping democratic reforms—that is to say, to dismantle the apparatus of Liberal hegemony.

Free votes in the Commons; an elected Senate; fixed election dates; a campaign finance law that not only bans corporate contributions (on which the Liberals have historically relied far more heavily than any other party) but also public subsidy (on which the Liberals were counting to replace the corporate cash); a transparent public appointments process, with parliamentary oversight; regulations to prevent the sale of instant memberships and other abuses in party nomination races: Each of these on its own would knock out a piece of the Natural Governing Party’s machinery of perpetual rule. Together, they would cripple it, perhaps irreparably.

And two other master strokes would finish the job. One, which would have to wait upon a Conservative majority, would be the abolition of the pork barrel: the winding down of the various regional development agencies and other institutions for dispensing funds and favours to friends of the government. And the other, looming suddenly on the horizon, is proportional representation.

The NDP, it is well known, has made a referendum on PR the pre-eminent condition of its support for any minority government. What is perhaps a less well-known part of the public record is a paper jointly authored for the Next City magazine in 1997 by Mr. Harper and Tom Flanagan, his chief advisor. Its title: Our Benign Dictatorship. Its solution: Proportional representation.