General elections held in Canada on the 23d of June, 1896, gave the Liberal Party 113 seats out of 213 in the Dominion House of Commons; the Conservatives securing 88, and the Patrons of Industry and other Independents 12. Much to the general surprise, the scale was turned in favor of the Liberals by the vote of the province of Quebec, notwithstanding the Manitoba school question, on which clerical influence in the Roman church was ranged against that party. The effect of the election was to call the Liberal leader, Sir Wilfred Laurier, of Quebec, to the head of the government, the Conservative Ministry, under Sir Charles Tupper, retiring on the 8th of July. CANADA: A. D. 1896-1897. Policy of the Liberal Government. Revision of the tariff, with discriminating duties in favor of Great Britain, and provisions for reciprocity. "The position of the Canadian Liberals, when they came into power after the General Election of 1896, was not unlike that of the English Liberals after the General Election of 1892. Both Liberal parties had lists of reforms to which they were committed. The English measures were in the Newcastle Programme. Those of the Canadian Liberals were embodied in the Ottawa Programme, which was formulated at a convention held at the Dominion Capital in 1893. … A large part of the Ottawa Programme was set out in the speech which the Governor-General read in the Senate when the session of 1897 commenced. There was then promised a measure for the revision of the tariff; a bill providing for the extension of the Intercolonial railway from Levis to Montreal; a bill repealing the Dominion Franchise Act and abolishing the costly system of registration which goes with it; and a measure providing for the plebiscite on the Prohibition question. Neither of these last two measures was carried through Parliament. Both had to be postponed to another session; and the session of 1897 was devoted, so far as legislation went, chiefly to the tariff, and to bills, none of which were promised in the Speech from the Throne, in retaliation for the United States Contract Labor Laws, and the new United States tariff. …