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Inside his second-floor corner office at Queen's Park one afternoon last week, it was business as usual for Ontario Premier Mike Harris.

Even those people who dislike the Progressive CONSERVATIVES have had to acknowledge something recently: in several ways, the Tories have become leaner - and possibly meaner.

Long ago, Anne McLellan learned to accept a daunting task with enthusiasm and a sense of duty. Growing up on her parents' dairy and chicken farm in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley, she helped gather the eggs produced by the family's flock of hens. All 17,000 of them.

In the end, the loony Smallwood scheme came to nothing.

 During his teenage years, Preston Manning spent many early daylight hours milking cows and performing other chores at the dairy farm near Edmonton owned by his father, Ernest, then the Social Credit premier of Alberta.

Brian Mulroney can't stop laughing. Sunk into the well-upholstered couch in his eleventh-floor, downtown Montreal law office, he is trying to read out loud from a glossy report - but keeps breaking into guffaws.

Finally, the question. It is not long: only 41 words in French, 43 in English. Nor is it as clear as Jacques Parizeau always promised it would be. It is, in fact, cloaked in ambiguity, carefully crafted to obscure the full magnitude of the decision that awaits Quebec's 4.9 million voters.

On a day when Premier Jacques Parizeau and more than 1,000 of his closest sovereigntist friends were meeting for an occasion they deemed "historic," the man most of them consider Quebec's constitutional devil incarnate was less than 25 km away, doing his best to ignore them.

It was 11:30 on the morning after the New Brunswick Liberal party's third consecutive election landslide, but Frank McKenna was still celebrating - his way. Operating on just 4½ hours of sleep, he had followed his usual morning ritual: after waking at six a.m.

Vivian Godfree had just cleared the morning dishes at her Pugwash, N.S., home when her mother called from the British city of Bristol with surprising news - the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to an antiwar movement spawned in the tiny Nova Scotia village where she lives.

The fateful moment looms. And with only days remaining before Quebec voters' crucial encounter at the ballot box on Monday, Oct. 30, the signs were far from comforting for federalists.

It took 128 years to make Canada into the country that it is today - and 10 hours of voting and a margin of only 53,498 votes to almost break with that past and reshape both the map and the country's future. No, 50.6 per cent, total votes: 2,361,526. Yes, 49.4 per cent, 2,308,028 votes.

At first in the House of Commons last week, it seemed that all the major players in the Quebec referendum had decided to go back to the future and behave as though one of the most divisive campaigns in Canada's history never happened.

Few political eras have begun in grander style. Twenty four hours after PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND's Conservatives ousted the Liberals in the Nov.

At moments during last week's Liberal nomination meeting in the provincial riding of Humber East in Corner Brook, Nfld., the spirit of the legendary Joey Smallwood seemed to permeate the room. At the microphone, a pumped-up Brian Tobin, in a pugilist's stance, was in full rhetorical flight.

By the standards he set during his street-brawling youth in Shawinigan, it was not much of a rout.

In the end, the protest sputtered out, a victim of high seas and bad weather in the choppy Straits of Florida. The 35 boats and several private planes that set out from Key West, Fla.

As usual, Brian Mulroney was dressed for the occasion, impeccably suited in sober, even prime ministerial, blue.

It was a short-lived fiasco that federal Liberals prefer to look upon as a petit faux pas.

On Christmas Eve, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien asked Brian Tobin to drop by 24 Sussex Drive for a private chat about the future. Longtime political colleagues and, more recently, personal friends, Chrétien and his fisheries minister had much to discuss.