The Canadian dream is over. Its place has been taken by the nightmare of the One Party State. Academics like J.L. Granatstein and Moncton University Professor of Government, Donald Savoie, have been rushing in with remedies for the dread disease of the one party Canadian state.

The business community has of course reacted to this phenomenon in its usual pragmatic way. Not content with controlling the Liberal party and Paul Martin, its likely future leader, they are arguing that a vigorous democracy requires a two- party system with both parties fully cognizant of corporate Canada's infinite intellectual policies and broad compassionate horizons.

Corporate-media chitchat is full of stories of Bay Street largess awaiting a united party of the Right. Tom d'Aquino, a former excellent speech writer for Pierre Elliott Trudeau, now president of the Business Council on National Issues, the voice of big business, said: "Any country that does not have a viable, responsible opposition will have a poorer democracy."

Why the sudden outburst of concern over majority Liberal power in Ottawa? Is it because the Liberals have at least 12 potential leaders in their leadership race while the Alliance rebel gang will soon be a baker's dozen and a third party of the Right in the House of Commons? Is it because the Great White Hope of the Right is Joe Clark, who lasted as prime minister for less than a year, lost his party leadership to Brian Mulroney and now leads a rump of 12 Tories?

Still, newspapers, academics and politicians cannot build a political house of brick from media straws in the wind. Social conservatism - the baiting of the old, the sick, the poor, the sexually different, the religiously non-observant - may get you a lot of votes in small town rural Canada, but Canada is not entirely small town and rural. Bashing labour unions, school teachers and the environmentally concerned may help you form a viable opposition party or even a provincial government but will not make a dent in the one-party Ottawa state we have now.

Canada has a one-party state because the Liberal party is the biggest tent in the Canadian political circus. For years, academics and journalists have focused on the great reformers of the federal Liberal party as the key to its prolonged success. No one ever talks about the reactionaries that have dwelt and prospered within the Liberal tent. Ross Thatcher, Liberal premier of Saskatchewan in the 1960s, and B.C.'s Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell come quickly to mind; so does right-to-life Liberal MP Tom Wappell.

Take my home province of Manitoba for example. In the 1890s, a reactionary and bigoted Manitoba Liberal government trashed francophone and Catholic schools creating a single public (read Protestant) school system. For decades and decades of Liberal rule, Winnipegers, constituting over half the province's population, had fewer than one quarter of the seats in the Manitoba legislature.

In the 1950s, Liberal Manitoba had more one-room classrooms than any province in Canada. When I worked as a summer student in the Manitoba Ministry of Education in the early '50s, one of my many tasks was to take province-wide exams written in Ukrainian for translation by a Ukrainian assistant deputy minister.

The Manitoba Liberal Blue Laws were legendary. No Sunday sports, no Sunday movies, no Sunday sex. Women were completely separated form men in beer parlours. Poker games in ethnic neighbourhoods were frequently raided.

Then in 1958 along came the fire-breathing radical Duff Roblin Tories. Overnight the Red Tories of Roblin and Dalton Camp promised equity, reform and tolerance in Manitoba. The Manitoba Liberal dynasty, the longest in Canadian history at the time, was at long last toppled. The Manitoba Liberals have never recovered and have never been in office since.

Oddly enough, no one ever levelled a one-party charge at the federal Liberals who reigned over Canada from 1935 to 1957, 22 years non-stop. Perhaps that was because the Liberals drove the last spike into the Great Depression, won the War and brought true independence in foreign affairs to Canada.

But by 1957 the Liberals were a big business government. C.D. Howe's "What's a million?" and his ramming through of a national pipeline for two Texans, was big business Bay Street government at its best. Pearson's and St. Laurent's condemnation of Britain in the 1956 Suez Crisis was a signal to many Anglo Canadians that their one and only home sweet political home was Diefenbaker Tory.

By 1957, the Liberals were right out of progressive ideas both in Manitoba and federally. By 1957 the Liberals' 'six buck boys' had insulted old age pensioners.

Diefenbaker was full of good ideas coming to him from Dr. Merril Menzies, Roy Faibish and the young Brian Mulroney. Diefenbaker had John Bassett, Wallace McCutcheon and Ted Rogers giving him all the business support he needed.

Today's Liberal tent is huge and totally intact. There are no loose tent flaps blowing in the wind.

The Liberals are the only national party that controls its reactionaries, in contrast to the Alliance where the reactionaries and social conservatives dominate both sides of every party debate. The Tories are badly stretched both left and right. Clark is neither a Duff Roblin nor a Diefenbaker.

The nattering of business nabobs, academic movers and shakers and the media will not make the Canadian one-party state wither or vanish in the foreseeable future. Any united party of the Right, congenitally insensitive to the basic conscience and tolerant mood of the country, can easily be beaten by any new Liberal leader from Paul Martin, Brian Tobin and Allan Rock to the right and centre, to Dennis Mills and Jim Coutts on the party's left.