Political parties in Canada

Canada is a very politically diverse nation and is home to dozens of political parties. Keeping track of them all can often be a very confusing ordeal.

As I explained on the parliament page, in Canada, the party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms the government and gets to chose the Prime Minister. The Party with the second-largest number of seats forms the Official Opposition.

Parties run candidates for seats in parliament, and their leaders run as candidates for Prime Minister. There are currently four parties with seats in the Parliament of Canada.

The Liberal Party of Canada is the party that ruled Canada from 1993 until 2006. It is currently the "official opposition" party.

The Liberals claim to be centrist party, but they are really more of a broad, left-of-center alliance. They've governed Canada for most of the country's history, usually with only short gaps inbetween. Generally, the party supports a big federal government that provides lots of social programs, expanded immigration, limited provincial powers, and social liberalism. They tend to use very patriotic language in their campaigns, and promote their liberal policies as being uniquely "Canadian" progressive ideas.

The Liberals are also famous for their pragmatism, however. Their agenda seems to fluctuate along with the waves of public opinion. Liberal prime ministers are often accused of "Governing by the Polls" and this is probably a fair criticism. To summerize, the Liberals are a status quo party who believe everything in Canada is generally good, and our current political institutions and programs should not be radically changed or altered.

Historically and to this day, most of the party's support comes from the Province of Ontario, which in recent elections has nearly unanimously elected the party in every single provincial riding. Quebec also tends to be a strong backer, and the Liberal Party's leadership contains numerous French-Canadians, including the present leader. Voters in Western Canada, especially BC and Alberta, rarely elect more than a small handful of Liberals to parliament.

Throughout the 90's and early 2000's the Liberals won federal elections in Canada by wide margins, mostly because of this strong voter base in the country's two largest provinces. They ruled for 13 straight years, and for a while some worried they would be in power forever. This sentiment was largley born from the fact that for a long time the right-wing opposition in Canada was split (see below). They were finally voted out of office in 2006 in favor of the newly-formed Conservative Party of Canada.

The Liberals are said to have a conservative faction and a more left-wing one. The old Liberal Prime Minister from the 90's, Jean Chretien, was more of a left-wing Liberal who favored big spending and progressive social policy. The more recent Liberal PM, Paul Martin, was more conservative, especially in economic matters. The two factions often clash- the rising influence of the conservative/Martin faction is largely what forced Chretien to resign.

Since the election of 2006, Canada's ruling party is the Conservative Party of Canada. It is a very recently created party, and was formed in 2003 by merging the Alliance Party and the Progressive Conservative Party. They generally believe in small government, low taxation, personal responsibility, traditional Christian morality, a strong military, and strong provincial governments.

To understand where the Conservative party stands today, it is probably best to review the histories of the two parties that form it.

The Canadian Alliance Party was formerly the second-largest party in Canada, and led the Official Opposition from 1997 to 2003. It was staunchly conservative in almost every way, from social issues, to economics, to foreign policy. Overall, the party had strong populist-Christian character, and was founded from a broad, grassroots dissatisfaction with modern Canadian liberalism. Alliance support was almost entirely centralized in the western Provinces of B.C. and Alberta. This was largely due to the party's focus on western interests, which it accused the Ontario-centric Liberal government of ignoring.

The Alliance party was originally called the "Reform Party" and was founded by a nerdish Albertan named Preston Manning in the late 1980's. At the time, Manning felt Canada lacked a "true" conservative party and formed Reform in direct opposition to the ruling Progressive Conservative Party, which he felt was too moderate, corrupt, and anti-Western. Under Mr. Manning's populist leadership the Reform party was able to evolve from a western grassroots movement to a powerful political force. In two short elections the party went from zero seats to 60, and Mr. Manning soon found himself in Ottawa as Leader of the Opposition.

Manning's obsession with reform would be his downfall however, and in 2000 the party restructured itself into the Alliance Party and elected the charismatic Stockwell Day to replace Manning as leader. Even though he was young and photogenic, Stockwell was regarded as a bit of a oddball, and Canadians did not seem to be impressed by his many wacky photo-ops or outspoken evangelicalism. A year later, the party turfed Stockwell, and elected the considerably duller Stephen Harper. Harper championed the cause of a merger with the Progressive Conservative Party, and when the two parties united he became leader of the new Conservative mega-party. Harper was then elected Prime Minister in 2006.

The fact that Harper now leads the Conservatives has led to some criticism that the new party is little more than the old Alliance / Reform Party with a new name. There is some truth to that; the Alliance was the bigger of the two parties, so naturally its members tend to dominate the Conservative union. The current policies of the Conservative Party are also somewhat more ideologically "hard-line" than the policies of the PC party ever were, though they have softened a bit as a result of compromises leading to the merger.

The old Progressive Conservative Party, also known as the "Tory Party" or the "PC" was, until the 2006 election, the only party other than the Liberals that had ever governed Canada. The Progressive Conservatives originally intended to be a broad "catch all" party for anyone who was to the right of the Liberals. As a result, at their peak, the PC party was a very complex coalition including Quebec nationalists, Western Canadian evangelicals, and Toronto business elites. This unstable alliance was hard to keep together, and as a result the PCs only rarely got elected to power.

The final reign of the PC Party was from 1984 to 1992, under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. For a variety of reasons, he ended up being extremely unpopular and resigned in 1992. The new Prime Minister who replaced him, a woman named Kim Campbell, somehow managed to be even more unpopular. After the 1993 election, the right-wing coalition broke up and the Tories went from being the most influential party in Canada to the most irrelevant. As you can see from the charts at the bottom of this page, during the 90's they struggled to hold onto a dozen seats in Parliament, and their hopes to ever again govern Canada quickly evaporated.

The decline of the Tories can largely be attributed to the rise of the new, more conservative Reform/Alliance party in the west and the rise of the nationalist Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. During the remainder of the 1990's the PC's base of operations became increasingly centered in Atlantic Canada. The Tories thus proceeded to become a slightly nostalgic, traditionalist party that appealed primary to older Canadians in Canada's oldest provinces. While socially liberal, they supported traditional "Toryist" views such as monarchism, collectivism, fiscal conservatism, a strong federal government, and "political sovereignty" from the United States. These sorts of policies had been historically the staples of the PC party, and Canadian conservatism in general, but during his tenure Mulroney had purged most of the classical Toryism from his party in favor of strict fiscal conservatism and and an increased emphasis on improving US-Canadian relations. Critics have dubbed his philosophy "neconservatism".

For this reason, many of the progressives or "Red Tories" in the PC Party hated Mulroney, and thus after he resigned they tried desparately to steer the party back to the left. By then all the Mulroneyite neoconservatives had gone to the Reform Party anyway, so this was not too hard. Time and time again the progressives in the PC rump opposed a merger with the Alliance Party, which they characterized as being too radical and right-wing. Former Prime Minister Joe Clark, who led the party from 1998 to 2003, opposed the merger with all his might, but when a new leader was elected in 2003 the old resistance was quickly dropped, and merger talks began almost instantly. Skepticism is still prominent among some Tories about the agenda of the new Conservatives, but as the minority faction of the party they often have a hard time getting their voices heard.

The new Conservative Party was elected to power in the January election of 2006, ending 13 years of Liberal rule and thus making the merger seem worthwhile.

The New Democratic Party, more commonly known as the NDP, is Canada's openly socialist party. Socialism has historically been an attractive political concept to many Canadians, and since its founding in the days of the Great Depression the NDP has ruled many of Canada's provincial governments over the years. They favor high taxes and really, really big government that handles just about everything. They also tend to be quite anti-American.

From its founding, the NDP was intended to be an ally of the "working class" and the labor movement. To this day, the party still has formal ties with several of Canada's biggest industrial unions, whose leaders are given special voting privileges within the party infrastructure. This fact makes the NDP quite brazenly a "special interest group" party.

For a long time the NDP was Canada's third-largest party, but alas, socialism is not as popular as it once was, and now the party is lucky if it can win more than a dozen seats. The NDP no longer even pretends like it can be elected to power- they simply ask to be voted in so they can "influence" a minority government. The assumption is simple: if the NDP holds even a small amount of seats in a narrowly-divided parliament they can exercise more sway in legislating, since their votes will be vital to getting laws passed. This sort of drama happened a lot in the 60's and 70's, but not so much these days.

The NDP is led by Jack Layton. Layton is a charismatic former Toronto city councilor- a bold departure from the party's previous two drab female leaders. Much of the New Democratic Party's future will be staked on how well he can make his agenda seem relevant to contemporary Canada, and not simply a relic of a bygone era. To this extent, Layton has moved the party away from its traditional working-class prarie union base, and towards young, urban liberals.

The NDP currently governs two Canadian provinces as well (Saskatchewan and Manitoba). They are interesting case studies, because in both situations the party had to struggle mightily in recent elections to retain their narrow majorities. In Saskatchewan in particular the party has actually ditched most of its socialist ways and is now getting fairly conservative.

The Bloc Quebecois is another one of Canada's newer parties, and is currently the country's third-largest. They rose in the aftermath of the Progressive Conservative Party meltdown of 1992. The party was founded by Lucien Bouchard, an ex-cabinet minister under Mulroney who grew bitter over the Prime Minister's "ignoring" Quebec.

Though generally left-wing, the Bloc is largely a one-issue party. Their only coherent political goal is help the province of Quebec to separate from Canada and form its own country. In Canadian political terms this ideology is known as Separatism. This idea comes and goes in terms of popularity; right now support for soverignity is fairly strong.

The Bloc only runs candidates within the province of Quebec, for obvious reasons. It is therefore impossible for the party to ever win enough seats to form a majority government, but that's not the point. The Bloc is a protest party, and by electing Bloc members the Quebeckers are expressing their disdain towards a federal government they consider illegitimate.

Of course once they enter parliament the Bloc members play along and largely act just like all the other parties. They vote and participate in committees and all the rest. At the same time their rallying cry always remains "what's in it for Quebec?" and they tend to show little interest in matters which don't have a direct relevance to their province. This caused for some odd times from 1993-1997, when the Bloc was the Official Opposition.

The Bloc Quebecois has a Provincial version of itself, known as the Parti Quebecois. Unlike the Bloc, the PQ actually governs, and Quebec has had several premiers from the party over the years. This is the party that has repeatly held referendums on separating Quebec from Canada.

Separatist politicians in Canada are generally held in low regard everywhere outside of Quebec. It's not uncommon to hear them described as traitors or fanatics, and as such most non-Quebec politicians want nothing to do with them. Slurs like "so-and-so is cozying up to the separatists!" or "so-and-so is playing right into the hands of the Bloc!" are often thrown around.

The Social Credit Party was once an important force in Canadian politics, but now no longer exists. For many years the Socreds, as they were known, ran the Provincial governments of B.C. and Alberta and were the most popular federal party in Quebec. They were a very right-wing party, with a lot of support among evangelical Christians. A series of internal scandals across the country hurt the party however, and by the 1990's they were a distant memory. The party's dissidents went on to form the Reform Party, and in BC took over the British Columbia Liberal Party. In Quebec, the Socreds (or Creditists as they were known) saw their support dry up after the Bloc Quebecois was founded. Overall, the demise of the Socreds can be largely attributed to the rise of regional-interest parties.

In some provinces, the political dynamic is still shaped by provinically-exclusive parties. In Saskatchewan, the second-largest party is called simply the Saskatchewan Party. It's generally right-wing and will probably be elected to power one of these days. Similarly, in the Yukon their ruling right-wing party is called the Yukon Party (apparently we Canadians aren't too creative with names). New Brunswick also used to have its own crazy conservative party too, known as the Confederation of Regions Party. They were in opposition status for a while, but they more or less died in the late 90's.

The environmentalist Green Party is an increasingly popular party to the Canadian left, though it has yet to elect a single member of parliament federally or provincially. It's present in some form all over the country, but has greatest support in BC and Ontario. Of all the "fringe" parties their poll numbers remain highest, and some have speculated the party may eventually unseat the NDP as the new voice of the progressive left. Unlike many other Green Parties around the world the Canadian version is not considered to be aggressively socialist in ideology. Right now the leader is an ex-PC party guy.

There is also a hilarious party called the Marijuana Party of Canada, whose only goal is to get Marijuana legalized. It's poorly organized and run, but seems to be popular with the young people for some reason. Then there's also the Communist Parties (we have two) the Natural Law Party (who want to repeal the law of gravity) and and endless parade of assorted others.