making many promises would help ensure a victory, thus the Red Book was created. The Red Book was drafted mainly by Paul Martin, who finished as runner-up in the 1990 Liberal leadership convention to Chrétien, and Chaviva Hošek a top policy official with the Liberals. By giving Martin a prominent role in the campaign, this was seen as Chrétien's attempt to unify the Liberal Party. Impact The Liberals rolled out the Red Book on September 19, not long after the September 8 election call. Several days later, the Progressive Conservatives released the hastily assembled A Taxpayer's Agenda, but the Liberals had captured the reputation of being the party with ideas since they had essentially released their entire platform. Thanks to the Red Book as well as a gradual decline in support for the governing Conservatives (unpopularity, vote splitting with Reform and Bloc), the Liberals won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best result in the party's history, and their best performance since their record 190 seats in the 1949 election. The Conservatives were nearly eliminated from the political scene, falling to two seats in the worst defeat ever suffered for a governing party at the federal level. Broken promises The specificity of the Red Book came back to haunt the Liberals, however, and much of the next few years were spent defending broken promises. The most notable of these was the Goods and Services Tax, which the Liberals had promised to replace but only did so in the Atlantic provinces. In Chrétien's view, the majority of the promises were kept. He famously argued that 78% were honoured, a mark he could live with. Others contest whether some of these promises were kept or not. Some of the most notable promises from the Red Book that were kept were the pledge to cancel the purchase of new naval helicopters, canceling the sale of Toronto Pearson International Airport, reforming unemployment insurance, legislating more gun control, and reducing the size of the armed forces with the end of the Cold War. Perhaps the most important pledge kept was that of returning Canada to fiscal solvency. New Liberal Red Books were published for the 1997 and 2000 elections. These contained far fewer specifics and more generalities. See also Election promise References External links How I Came to be Involved in the Red Book Partial Text of the 1993 Red Book Partial Text of