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She hails from the great Outback, but nothing quite prepared Australian Karen George for the sheer magnitude of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.

Among political strategists, it is sometimes known as "the barbecue factor": the manner in which a once-hot candidate ends up cooked on election day. The principal example, one that many of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's strategists recall with a shudder, is former Ontario Liberal leader Lyn McLeod.

In the end, he stole quietly away, not quite like a thief in the night but certainly without the noisy flourish that once trumpeted all the movements of Mobutu Sese Seko.

They cried often, smothering their sobs with their hands, as the prosecutor meticulously detailed how their relatives had died in the horrifying explosion.

The trial took 10 months, its drama unfolding daily behind floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass in the highest-security courtroom in British Columbia. Spectators passed through a metal detector before entering the B.C. Supreme Court in Surrey, a southeast suburb of Vancouver.

The oldtimers call it a "capelin squall" - a mixture of bone-chilling winds, rain and fog that typically hammers the NEWFOUNDLAND coast in late June just as the capelin are coming inshore to spawn.

On the last day of what may have been Jean Chrétien's final election campaign, the Prime Minister went back to the place where his life and his political career both began.

Nicole Mitchell seems visibly relieved to have found someone to listen as she runs through her list of menopause symptoms.

Cpl. Mark Gibeault missed the big news conference. Many of his colleagues gathered around TVs last week at the Comox, B.C., armed forces base to applaud Defence Minister Arthur Eggleton's long-awaited announcement that Canada would buy 15 new search-and-rescue helicopters.

In a dark high-school hallway in Cowansville, Que., two elderly women tried to play canasta by candlelight one night last week. Since the power went out on Jan.

Just past the halfway point in the four-week Ontario election campaign, nastiness was lurking around every corner. Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty accused Premier Mike HARRIS of lying baldly and of pitting Ontarians against each other in a callous bid for votes.

For a diplomat, words are everything, and the world's top diplomat had reason to regret some of his last week. Kofi Annan, the United Nations' secretary general, was flying back from Baghdad after negotiating the arms-inspection deal that averted a new American attack on Iraq.

It was the moment when a bad week for the Liberal government's Quebec strategy got worse.

Instead, the glory went to players like Pavel Bure, the Russian rocketeer with a sweet scoring touch, and Dominik Hasek, the Czech goaltender built like a slab of the old Berlin Wall - with Cold War-era impenetrability.

It was a sight to behold: men and women who have dumped all over the province's public electrical utility from the dawn of political time, running in rhetorical circles in an effort to persuade worried voters and nervous consumers that Ontario Hydro's decision to write $6.

There has been growth - but, lately, in the field of bad news (page 54). On Jan. 27, the company announced an after-tax loss in 1997 of close to $260 million. That figure, the firm acknowledged, included $88 million worth of reclaimed copper that Philip could not account for.

Nursing professor Ellie MacFarlane is a self-confessed "technological klutz," the type of person who finds programming a videocassette recorder a daunting experience. So it was with some trepidation that she learned last year that St.

Tobin's chipper words aside, there remain daunting hurdles to overcome if the premier's power play is to become a reality by 2007, the target completion date.