No party that has ever had to fight a real election has had as serene and durable a conviction that it was the natural party of government as the Canadian Liberals. From 1896 to 1984, the Liberals won 15 full terms to four for the Conservatives. Through the years since the death in 1891 of Sir John Macdonald, the founder of the country as an autonomous confederation in 1867, and of the Conservative Party, that party was essentially a catchment for disparate elements who happened not to be Liberals, in particular grumpy prairie farmers and the Toronto financial community, who could not agree on anything except their dislike of the Liberals. From 1891 to 2006, the Liberals had eight leaders, seven elected to full terms as prime minister, and the Conservatives had 19 leaders, only four of whom were elected to full terms as prime minister.                            

The Liberal fortress was first sacked when the Conservatives finally chose a leader who spoke French and knew Quebec intimately, Brian Mulroney; and in 1984 he shattered the Liberal stranglehold on Quebec. The status of the Liberals as Canada's indispensable guarantor of the integrity of the country evaporated. Mulroney produced a constitutional resolution plan that ultimately foundered on objections from Newfoundland and native people (Plains Indians), while his Quebec support defected to the separatists and his western support to a regional grouping; Mulroney retired, still master of a parliamentary majority. But his successor presided over the reduction of a Conservative majority in Parliament of over three hundred to a total of two Conservative MPs (not including Mulroney's successor as prime minister, Kim Campbell, whose next post was consul-general in Los Angeles).

The next three Liberal leaders, John Turner, Jean Chrétien, and Paul Martin, only had 22 years as leader and 13 as prime minister, as the great Liberal mystique had gone and all that was left was a severely fragmented opposition. That enabled Chrétien, a stout-hearted federalist veteran of a whole generation of Quebec political battles, but a rough man who was not always comprehensible in either official language, and who almost lost the 1995 independence referendum in Quebec with a wail of appeal on its eve not to "break up the country", to remain in office for ten years. He became the only elected prime minister in Canadian history to be evicted from that office by his own party. 

His successor and finance minister, Paul Martin (it was a little like Paul Keating pulling the rug out from under Bob Hawke in Australia in 1991, though the Australians, as usual, were more colourful personalities), was handed a grenade with the pin pulled by Chrétien in a scandal involving Liberal largesse to supporters in the  1995 referendum. By this time Stephen Harper, former head of a conservative taxpayers' activist group, had united the old Conservative Party with the western renegade conservative party of which he, an Albertan, had been a founder. Harper brought down the Liberal government in 2006  and defeated Martin at the polls.  

The next Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, was the first in 119 years not to be prime minister. Dion only won the leadership after Martin was defeated at the polls. Michael Ignatieff, who had been parachuted into a safe constituency to the very audible disgruntlement of the incumbent Liberal, blew his campaign for the leadership, having started as the favourite. This was where the Ignatieff predestination script started to go horribly wrong. Two years later, after Dion had committed the Liberals to a mad adherence to the Kyoto Accords that would have impoverished Canada, Harper was re-elected with an enlarged minority government.