THE immigration official at Ottawa airport was inquisitive. What was the nature of my business? Having heard I was an Irish Times correspondent, he asked: "What brings you here then?"
It can be risky to `be cheeky' with passport officials but with a general election less than a week away, like the Kerryman I answered with another question: "Can't you guess?" His face showed that he couldn't and wouldn't so, I said brightly, "Your election".
"Oh, that," he said. "I'm glad someone's interested."
Yes, the Canadian election is not causing sleepless nights but it is important for this huge but troubled country troubled because it is still facing eventual break-up over the long-threatened secession of Quebec.
It was not meant to be an issue in this election. In fact the Prime Minister of the Liberal government, Jean Chretien, called the election 18 months ahead of time so that he could campaign on his economic record well ahead of the next referendum on Quebec.
But then Preston Manning, leader of the right-wing Reform Party based in Alberta, began shaking the Quebec can of worms. Where the Liberals, the much-shrunken Progressive Conservatives and the left-wing New Democratic Party have all agreed to treat Quebec as a "distinct society" and hand it over as much powers as possible short of independence, Mr Manning says enough is enough.
Let Quebec be treated exactly like every other of the nine provinces and none of this "distinct society" pussy-footing or "two-nations" theory. He was saying aloud in his Alberta twang what most Canadians from the western prairies and British Columhia think.
Quebec's ceaseless demands have exasperated the rest of Canada as successive governments in Ottawa wrestle with formulas to keep the restless province inside the confederation. But it seems as if it is just a matter of time until Quebec votes to leave. In 1995, the "Yes" vote failed by a whisker - 0.4 per cent.
It is impossible to get away from the "unity question". Jean Cbarest, the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, knows this to his cost. He is from Quebec and was hoping to regain lost Conservative seats there when Suzanne Tremblay, the deputy leader of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, taunted him with concealing the fact that he is called "John" on his birth certificate.
MR CHAREST, a chubby 38-year-old with reddish curls, admitted she was right. It was his Irish mother who registered his birth, he explained.
But he found it a cheap point-scoring exercise by his political opponents. He told an election rally: "You can call me John, or you can call me Jean or you can even call me Sean if you want to, but please call me Canadian until the end of my days."
Mr Charest has the enormous task of trying to rebuild the Conservatives after their wipe-out in the 1993 election after to years in power under Brian Mulroney. The party went from 154 seats to a derisory two.
This left the Bloc Quebecois as the official Opposition with 54 seats but having the separatist party in this role in the federal parliament makes many Canadians uneasy.
One newspaper columnist, Peter Worthington, wrote bluntly: "Canada would have been better served had there been a credible, loyal Opposition instead of a cabal of conspirators seeking to wreck the concept of a united, harmonious Canada siphoning off perks and benefits. All with the uneasy collusion of a Liberal government committed to bribery and appeasement to keep Quebec content."
It will not be possible in this election for the Conservatives to win enough seats to become the principal Opposition party. The Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois are neck and neck for this position, as the latest poll shows the reigning Liberals holding on to power.
Hence this is more an election about which party will be the main opposition. A rather odd kind of election which might explain the immigration official's lack of interest.
As one reporter wrote this week: "Where's the election campaign? Where are you hiding this thing? I know it's out there somewhere . . . But I've been mucking around the west - British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan for the better part of two weeks, and I've gotta to tell you. If you hadn't read somewhere that there's an election going on, you'd be hard pressed to find one."
WELL, it's going on all right and it may be the one that confirms that there are no longer any genuinely national parties in Canada, as the Liberals and Conservatives used to be. The Liberals will get back to power by winning most of their seats in the central province of Ontario which has 40 per cent of the electorate but the days when they also dominated Quebec are gone.
The Bloc Quebecois will for obvious reasons not win a seat outside Quebec. The Conservatives will struggle in Ontario and win seats in the Atlantic provinces while Reform will mop up the west.
This fragmentation of once national parties into mainly regional groupings is another dangerous indication of eventual break-up. Mr Manning is feared and despised as a bigot by the other parties but he is making them confront the "unity question" in an election which was sweeping it under the carpet.