Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien won his gamble Monday, with his Liberal Party picking up parliament seats in an election called 31/2 years into his five-year term. But even as voters, particularly in the eastern half of the nation, reaffirmed his party’s policies, conservative opponents in the west rejected them soundly.

If division exists in Canada, seen from the outside, anyway, it is most often cultural and centers on Quebec. But Monday’s election suggests that it may also be political – tax cuts, health care privatization, security for seniors – and that the split occurs somewhere in Manitoba, with the east strongly supporting Mr. Chretien’s more liberal government, and British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan supporting the Canadian Alliance, led in the election by former preacher Stockwell Day of Alberta.

It was unusual enough for Mr. Chretien to prevail in a third consecutive election, and certainly the support of the Atlantic provinces, which were lukewarm toward the Liberals in 1997, must have been gratifying. But the longtime leader is now left with the question of how to lead a nation going in different directions at either end. Consider that during the campaign Mr. Chretien accused Mr. Day of supporting a plan to make Canada’s health care system more like the one in the United States, a thought that makes a good part of Canada shudder. But in Alberta, Premier Ralph Klein already has begun some forms of private health care, so the charge may have been seen in part a compliment.

Don’t expect major changes in health care from the Liberal Party, which gained a dozen seats to hold 173 of the 301 in the House of Commons, but Mr. Chretien will have to follow through in a campaign pledge to provide a $67 billion tax cut over five years. The cut rides on Canada’s healthy economy, which has produced three years of budget surpluses after some historically high deficits in the early 1990s. For the U.S. economy, the decision to return money to Canadian consumers ought to be good news.

This was by all accounts Mr. Chretien’s last election – even some of his supporters wondered during the campaign whether his 37 years in federal politics was already enough. But he fulfilled his duty to his party by expanding its majority and ensured for the next several years that Liberals will dominate as they has done for 60 of the last 80 years. Someone else will have to address the very different sort of political outlook that is growing in Canada’s West.