POLITICS : In Canada Election, Question Isn’t Who, but by How Much : Jean Chretien’s Liberals are the odds-on favorites. Their victory would end nine years of Tory rule.

With Canadians going to the polls on Monday, little doubt remains about the identity of this country’s next prime minister.

It will almost certainly be Jean Chretien, 59, a French-speaking member of Parliament and the Liberal Party leader, a strong federalist who held prominent Cabinet portfolios in the late-1960s-through-early-1980s governments of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

For the past few weeks, opinion surveys have consistently shown that the Liberals will finish first among the five main parties contesting the election. Support for the Progressive Conservatives, who form the current government and have been in power since 1984, has suffered a comprehensive collapse.

In Canada’s system of government, the leader of the party winning the most parliamentary seats becomes prime minister.

The main question left to be answered after Monday’s voting is whether the Liberals will be able to form a majority government or whether they will have enough seats for only a minority--an inherently weak government that would have to negotiate voting alliances for every piece of legislation it hoped to enact.

A party must win at least 148 seats to achieve a majority in the House of Commons. Recent polls suggest the Liberals will win anywhere from 140 to 170.

Chretien’s Liberals stand, in general, for economic pump-priming, mild budget-cutting and opposition to Quebec independence. These policies have made them popular in Canada’s impoverished Atlantic provinces and in the huge, central province of Ontario. In those two regions alone, the party could win 100 to 120 seats, according to most polls.

But that isn’t enough to give them the majority they seek. And the Liberals cannot count on making up the rest in Quebec, where resentment of the party’s longstanding refusal to countenance the nationalist aspirations of French-speaking Quebecers is at something of a peak.

Nor can the Liberals expect to do particularly well in Western Canada, where many voters consider them the enemy, thanks to a Trudeau-era energy pricing policy that favored the consumers of Eastern Canada at the expense of the oil and gas producer-driven economy of the West.

If, despite this, Chretien succeeds in achieving his majority, he will immediately fall heir to far more power than the U.S. political system gives its Presidents. Canadian members of Parliament are expected to vote unanimously with their parties, so a party with a solid majority of the seats can pass virtually any bill it introduces.

The Progressive Conservatives now have a majority government, and they have used it over the past nine years to ram through Parliament some unpopular measures, such as a broadly hated, 7% value-added tax on most goods and services.

Such bare-knuckled use of power is held against the Tories by the majority of Canadians, and has much to do with their poor fortunes in 1993. Current polls suggest they could finish in fourth place, which would mean the end of Kim Campbell’s 4 1/2-month stint as prime minister.

Monday’s vote will also answer the intriguing question of which of two relatively new, regional parties will finish second. The party with the second-most seats in the Canadian House of Commons forms the official opposition, receiving financial and staff support and an impressive number of perks.

The two parties competing for second place could not be more different: the Reform Party, a grass-roots, anti-big-government movement strong in Western Canada, and the Bloc Quebecois, a single-issue party that seeks Quebec’s independence and little else.