Canada is a highly political country, and our partisan system reflects this. With at least four national political parties and many more at the provincial level, it can sometimes be a bit of a headache to keep track of them all.

Political parties hold a great deal of power in the Canadian system of government. Indeed, the entire parliamentary system presumes the existence of parties and would not be able to function without them.

The political party that can elect the most members to the House of Commons is said to “become the government” after an election. Its leaders become the prime minister and cabinet ministers. The second biggest party in parliament is called “the official opposition.” I have more about this in my House of Commons section.

Political parties in Canada are all organized the same way, in a very hierarchical fashion. They have a single “leader” at the top, who is pretty much the boss of what the party does. The leader formulates the policy of the party, and the other politicians are expected to obey his agenda and support the pursuit of his political goals.

Being a “member” of a party in Canada is similarly a formal affair, in which you hold an active, paid membership in a political party. Party membership presumes loyalty and adherence to party values, and as such the leader can revoke it from people who misbehave. Only about 2% of Canadians actually hold membership in a political party. It’s mostly politicians, their organizers, and staff.

During elections, party leaders run as candidates for the office of prime minister, and they are the highest authority when it comes to “speaking for the party” in any official capacity.

History of the Parties

Organized political parties emerged in eastern Canada during the mid-19th Century, following the introduction of elected assemblies in the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. At the time, the big issue of the day was British rule, which polarized segments of the population in different ways.

One group, known as the “Tories” consisted of wealthy British-born Protestant men who owned land and industry in the colonies. They championed the existing social order of British colonial rule, largely because it benefited themselves. They were very distrustful of democracy, which they saw as a traitorous scheme to disrupt the the wealth and efficiency of the status quo.

The other group, known as the “Grits” were the reformers. Many were French or Catholic, and thus outsiders to the political elite. They viewed the present state of affairs as exploitative and unfair, and envied the democratic political system of the United States. Politically, they wanted to limit the powers of the colonial governors, enshrine rights for French-Canadians and Catholics, and give greater authority to the colonies’  elected legislatures. Many went even farther, and wanted their colony to become an independent republic or join the United States of America.

As the years went on, both groups moderated their policies and learned to compromise under an a new and more democratic parliamentary system. The Grits evolved into the Liberal Party, while the Tories became the Progressive Conservative Party. Though ideologies would evolve, the two party system first established in the colonial era still lives on in Canada today. People still even use the nicknames “Grits” and “Tories” to describe modern-day liberals and conservatives.

The Federal Parties

Modern Canada has four “main” federal parties, which is to say parties that have successfully elected members in the federal parliament of Canada.

The Liberals

The Liberal Party of Canada is the party that ruled Canada from 1992 to 2006. Prior to that, they governed Canada for most of the 20th Century, with only short breaks. Today they are the country’s second largest party, and make up the “Official Opposition” in parliament.

The Liberals claim to be a “centrist” party, but it may be more accurate to describe them as a broad, left-of-center alliance. Historically, they were the party of reform and social progress, in contrast to the Conservatives, who were generally reactionary and anti-change. Since the Second World War, the Liberals have become the party most associated with the modern “welfare state” and the idea that the government holds an obligation to provide certain social services to the citizenry, such as healthcare, education, and unemployment insurance.

The party was furthest left during the reign Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who ruled from 1968 to 1984. Distrustful of the free market, Trudeau saw government as the best source of prosperity for Canada, and during his rule state spending and the size of government rose dramatically. He reign saw the expansion of many social programs, but also high deficits, debt, and inflation.

Socially, Trudeau championed the idea of Canada becoming a egalitarian, “multi-cultural” society, in which peoples of all races and religions were seen as equals, and taboos on sex and alternative lifestyles were lessened. A prominent French-Canadian intellectual before becoming prime minister, he also devoted a lot of energy to appeasing French-Canadian nationalism by making Canada an officially bilingual country and engaging in widespread affirmative action programs to ensure Quebecers were represented (or over-represented) in all levels of the Canadian state.

After an absence from power during the 1980’s, in the 1990’s the Liberal party returned to power under Jean Chretien, who had been Trudeau’s understudy. A skilled politician in his own right, Chretien helped move the party more to the right, believing (correctly, as it turns out) that this would help him win more elections. Chretien’s government made balanced budgets and fiscal conservatism a high priority, while his finance minister supported lowering taxes and cutting some social programs to achieve these goals.

Today the Liberal Party portrays itself as a party that is fiscally responsible, but socially progressive. They are strongly supportive of abortion rights and (now) gay marriage, but also favor a largely unregulated free market. The party also champions itself as being the supporters of the traditional welfare state, and opposes conservatives who call for the scaling back of programs such as universal healthcare.

Generally speaking, the Liberals are a status-quo party who believe Canada generally “works,” and its key institutions and programs should not be tampered with. They also tend to use a lot of patriotic language in their campaigns, and present themselves as the defenders of a uniquely “Canadian” progressive way of life. Liberals are also fond of presenting themselves as “good internationalists” who are obedient to things like the UN and the Kyoto protocol.

Liberals draw their electoral support mostly from urban Canadians, mainly in Ontario and Quebec, the provinces where the party has its strongest footholds. Immigrants and French-Canadians have a long history of backing the party, and most of its leaders have been from Quebec. It can also be seen as an “establishment” party that enjoys the backing of many of Canada’s largest corporations, bureaucratic elite, and powerful families.

The Conservatives

The Conservative Party (CPC) is the party that currently governs Canada, but it’s also Canada’s newest party, and only came into being in 2003. Previously, what is now the CPC used to be two distinct parties, the Progressive Conservatives and the Canadian Alliance. In order to understand what the CPC is about today, you need to understand the history of the two parties who merged to form it.

The Progressive Conservatives

The Progressive Conservative Party was, until 2006, the only party other than the Liberals that ever governed Canada. It’s periods of rule were generally been brief, in contrast to the Liberals, who tend to govern for  long periods of time. For most of their existence the PCs were basically a broad alliance party for everyone who was to the right of the Liberals.

In the early days, the Progressive Conservative Party was the party of white, English-Canadians and heavily influenced by Victorian ideas about hierarchy and social Darwinism. They defined themselves through their unwavering loyalty to the Crown and Empire, and generally tried to retain Canada’s “British character.” This ideology was known as Toryism, and its followers were Tories. Economically, the Tories offered blind support for free-market (or perhaps “Robber Baron”) capitalism, and generally opposed the welfare state in any form.

The Conservatives formed Canada’s first government in 1867, and governed for much of the late 19th Century, but then proceed to be perennially out of power. Part of this was due to the fact that the Tories had no real strategy for winning the votes of French-Canadians, which much of the party’s Anglo-Protestant base still privately despised.

After the second world war, the Conservatives’ ideology became more pragmatic. There was no longer an Empire to defend, and classist notions of social hierarchy were moderated into a new philosophy that argued government services were a key aspect to maintaining an organized and efficient society. In the 60’s and 70’s the PC party became increasing moderate and left-wing, with the differences between them and the Liberal Party becoming quite blurred. Both parties supported increasing government control over the economy, and during the long reign of Pierre Trudeau the PCs more or less supported all of the Liberal Prime Minister’s more controversial initiatives, such as introducing official bilingualism and rewriting the Canadian constitution.

Then in the 1980’s moderation became unfashionable. The PCs kept losing elections to the Liberals, and many bigwigs within the party felt it was because there was not enough difference between themselves and their opponents.

Canadian conservatives began to take inspiration from the bold new conservative (or, “neo-conservative“) trends in England and America. Free markets became popular again, and Tories began to that argue big government caused more problems than it solved. An enthusiastic backer of this ideology was Brian Mulroney, a former corporate CEO who was elected leader of the PC Party in 1983, then served as Prime Minister from 1984 to 1993. During his time in office, Mulroney supported efforts to cut government spending, deregulate industry, and privatize government holdings in an effort to give free market forces greater influence over the economy. He also supported closer ties with the US as a way of bringing in greater trade and investment. Lastly, and most importantly, Mulroney was also a French Canadian, which gave him much needed credibility in Quebec. He argued that for all their talk, the Liberals had not actually done much to better Quebec society, and tried to govern in a way that was somewhat more sympathetic to French-Canadian nationalists, which the Liberals had always fought.

Mulroney was quite successful, and to this day a lot of his views on government’s role in the economy remain fairly mainstream, even the Liberal Party. However, Mulroney became very unpopular by the end of his term, largely because of two very divisive botched attempts to dramatically amend the Canadian constitution and another botched attempt at tax reform. He resigned, and his dopey, short-lived successor, Kim Campbell, somehow managed to be even more unpopular. She led the PC party to an enormous landslide defeat, from 169 seats to just two. The Reform Party (see below) took away most of the right-wing vote, and the newly centrist Liberals took away most of the rest.

The PC party never recovered from the defeat, and became a very minor place player in Canadian politics for much of the 1990’s, perennially delegated to fifth-place status in the parliament. The rump PC moved sharply to the left after the fall of Mulroney and Campbell, and tried to return to the party’s 1970’s ideology where it was much more a friend of government and more hostile to the USA. This never paid off, and the party never won more than a handful of seats, mostly in Atlantic Canada where such old-fashioned views of progressive conservatism were still popular.

The Reform Party / The Canadian Alliance

In 1987 two fellows from Alberta named Preston Manning and Stephen Harper decided to found a new political party. Though both right-wingers themselves, they deeply resented the Progressive Conservative Party of Brian Mulroney, which they felt was too moderate, corrupt, and anti-western. Harper, an economist, felt that Mulroney was only paying lip-service to fiscal conservatism while actually doing little to curtail the expanding size and power of the federal government, while Manning, an evangelical intellectual, felt that the overly pragmatic Prime Minister had sold out his traditional Christian supporters by refusing to champion social causes like capital punishment or opposition to abortion. Both felt that Mulroney, a wealthy Quebec-born member of Canada’s political elite, was basically out-of-touch and indifferent to rural Canadians in the western provinces.

So the two of them made a new party, the Reform Party, that would offer staunch support for free-market principles, a socially-conservative domestic policy, and a populist drive for bringing greater democracy and accountability to Ottawa.

At first everyone in Ottawa thought Reform were just a gang of redneck kooks, but their party enjoyed great popularity in western Canada as Mulroney grew more unpopular. After two short elections the party went from zero seats to 60, as many right-wing voters switched from PC to Reform. In 1996 Reform became the second-largest party in parliament, and Manning became Leader of the Opposition. Though Reform had little support in urban Ontario and most of Quebec (the latter which largely perceived the party as ignorant and anti-French, which there was probably some truth to) they continued to enjoy heavy grassroots appeal from dissatisfied, working class Canadians in rural communities, who felt alienated by the supposedly elitist nature of the Liberals and the PCs, and the socialism of the union-backed party, the NDP (see below).

As the 90’s progressed Manning was increasingly seen as liability. He had served his purpose as a breakthrough leader but no longer offered innovative leadership to appeal to new voters. In 2000 he was kicked out as leader and replaced with Ontario-born Stockwell Day. The party also renamed itself the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, and was henceforth known as simply “the Alliance.”

The Party made some gains under Day, but not enough. And Day was regarded as a bit of a goofball. So in 2002 he was turfed and Stephen Harper, who was still hanging around, became leader. He promised to bring about what had become an increasingly popular idea in right-wing circles- namely that the Reform Party and the PC rump should join forces to create a new, mega-party capable of defeating the Liberals, who had by then won three back-to-back elections largely due to a fractured opposition.

Joe Clark, who was leading the PC Party at the time, opposed a merger with all his might. A former Mulroney cabinet minister who had served briefly as prime minister in the 1970’s, he was of the belief that the PC’s future lay in presenting itself as a moderate, liberal alternative to the Liberal Party. He viewed merging with the PCs as an alliance with a bunch of far-right traitors. But then in 2003 Joe Clark stepped down, and a new pro-merger leader, Peter MacKay, was elected in his place.

MacKay and Harper inked a deal in 2003, with Harper showing good faith by basically conceding every major sticking point to the PCs, significantly moderating the platform of the Alliance party in order to make it palatable. Harper was then elected as first leader of the new Conservative Party of Canada, a predictable occurrence as the Alliance was the much bigger partner in the marriage.

In 2006 the new, post-merger party was elected to power and Harper became Prime Minister. His cabinet is composed of roughly equal parts PCers and Reformers. Though there are still some whiners like Joe Clark kicking around, for the most part the old PC establishment of Mulroney’s day has now come to accept Mr. Harper as the rightful spiritual heir to Canada’s conservative movement.

Today, the Conservative Party is far less radical than it was in the Reform-Alliance days, and no longer advocates the sort of dramatic political reforms they once did. Harper spends a lot of time denying that he has a “far right” agenda, or hidden agenda, and wants to be seen as a party of sensible, moderate, competent government.

It’s thus somewhat unclear how many meaningful differences there are between the Liberal Party and the Conservatives at this point. Both parties have very similar economic philosophies and both govern in an attempt to win votes of the centre, rather than the left or right.

Social issues tend to be the matter of most contention. Though the Conservatives no longer make as big a deal of supporting traditional Christian morality, socially-conservative Christians still have an important influence within the party. Harper, along with most of his MPs, oppose abortion and gay marriage and support capital punishment, but do not treat these issues as priorities. Conservatives, unlike Liberals, are also more likely to make cut to things like federal arts funding and affirmative action programs, believing that this sort of stuff is not government’s business.

The Conservatives still largely enjoy the support of working-class, rural Canadians while the Liberals have stronger support with middle and upper class city dwellers. Class and region continues to be one of the biggest polarizing indicators of political affiliation in Canada.

Second-tier parties

The NDP

The New Democratic Party (NDP) is Canada’s openly socialist party. Founded during the depression era, when socialism was popular among the working classes in rural communities, the party has always championed issues which are to the left of the Liberal party. They have, for example, supported gay rights long before the Liberals found it popular to do so, and place a much greater emphasis on preserving (or expanding) welfare state programs than defending the free market. The NDP are “Liberals in a hurry” someone once quipped.

The NDP are very hostile to cuts to any government service, and generally believe the government has an obligation to aggressively alleviate poverty, protect the environment, and punish greedy corporations. They do not generally oppose taxes, especially redistributive “progressive” taxes, for this reason, because they believe the government should posses a large budget to fund all these initiatives. The NDP is also known for being hostile to the United States, for generally leftist reasons. They have a pacifist tradition, and dislike bold foreign policy adventures.

The NDP has not been terribly successful at the national level, and usually only elects around 20 seats to the House of Commons, making it the fourth-place party in parliament. The party is generally honest about its chances, though, and doesn’t really think that their support will ever get high enough for them to actually come to power and form a government. Instead, NDP strategy is to win enough seats to “influence” a minority government, preferably a Liberal one. If the Liberals only win a plurality of seats, and the NDP comes in a strong third place, the two parties can form an alliance to get legislation passed and outmaneuver the Conservatives. Since the NDP would hold the balance of power, they could in turn force the Liberals to embrace more left-wing policies than normal. Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau were two Liberal Prime Ministers who had to rely on NDP support in this manner at various times in their careers.

NDP support used to come from unionized, working-class Canadians in the west, and indeed, the party was partially founded to serve as the political arm of organized labour. To this day, many big unions enjoy enshrined voting privileges within the party infrastructure, to assure their influence. Today, however, the NDP has largely lost the working-class vote to the Conservatives, and now centers its base in big, urban cities with wealthy, young, progressive populations.

The NDP has been most successful in provincial politics, where it has been able to elect a number of provincial premiers to power. Today the NDP is only in power in Manitoba, though many of the western provinces have had off-and-on NDP governments for much of the post-war era.

Bloc Quebecois

The Bloc Quebecois is the third-largest party in parliament, though it’s also the strangest.

As I explain in greater detail on the Quebec page, the politics of Quebec are largely dominated by the nationalistic question of whether or not Quebec should separate from Canada and form a new, independent country. Supports of this ideology are called separatists.

Separatism was always around, but it was not until the 1970’s that it became a mainstream political movement. In 1968 the Parti Quebecois, a pro-separatist political party, was founded, and in 1975 it won a majority of seats in the Quebec legislature. The PQ soon became the most powerful party in Quebec, though it was not affiliated with any of the three national parties. Since the government of Canada was governed by the Liberal Party at the time, however, and the PQ saw themselves as anti-federalist, this sort of put them in a strategic marriage of convenience with the Progressive Conservative Party, though it should be noted that ideologically the PQ has always been quite left-wing.

When Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister he reached out to soft nationalists and even separatists in Quebec to build a trans-Canadian political machine. One of the men he recruited to this end was a prominent Quebec lawyer named Lucien Bouchard, who served as a close confidant in his cabinet. Though he was a strong nationalist, Bouchard believed Quebec could be accommodated within Canada if the constitution was changed to give his province more power. He thus supported Mulroney’s 1987 attempt to do this, then became very disillusioned and enraged when the plan failed.

No longer believing Quebec had a future in Canada, Bouchard left the PCs in 1991 and founded the Bloc Quebecois, a nationalist, separatist party. It would be the federal branch of the Parti Quebecois, and finally give Quebec voters an an openly separatist party to vote for at the national level.

The Bloc became very popular very quickly. It instantly won 54 seats in the 1993 election, and became the official opposition. Though it lost this status in 1996, it has remained Canada’s perennial third-place party, and always wins the majority of seats in Quebec. Separatism and nationalism continue to be appealing forces to many Quebec voters, and many others are simply attracted by the Bloc’s unapologetic agenda of “looking out for Quebec” and no one else. Like the PQ, the BQ is quite leftist in its general ideology, perhaps closest to the NDP.

Despite its separatist agenda, the party does participate fully in day-to-day lawmaking, and its members sit on government committees and advisory boards and all the rest. They also collect their federal pensions, which remains an issue of some controversy.

It is impossible for the Bloc Quebecois to ever become the government of Canada, since the party only runs candidates in Quebec, and thus will always be outnumbered in parliament by the seats of the other provinces. Separatism will likewise almost certainly never come as a result of national policy, either, so in some respects the Bloc is kind of useless as a federal political party. However, its members don’t view themselves as a “party of Canada” in the conventional sense. The Bloc defines itself more as a voice of opposition and protest, rather than lawmaking. It defends the interests of Quebecers and serves its constituents, basically allowing guilt-free participation in a federal government many Quebeckers feel is illegitimate.

The Greens

The Green Party has no seats* in the parliament of Canada, or indeed any provincial parliament, yet it tends to poll quite high, sometimes in the low teens. This is a very recent phenomenon, however, and people have only started to take the party seriously since about the early 2000’s.

Like all Green Parties, the Canadian Greens have a largely environmentalist agenda and their biggest priorities deal with things like climate change, land conservationism, and sustainability reforms.

The Green Party is one of those parties full of people who claim to transcend the traditional “left/right” dichotomy, but this is a bit of a misnomer. On issues like healthcare, trade, foreign policy, and of course, the environment, they are quite obviously on the left and take traditionally liberal positions. Greens make much of the fact that they are also “fiscally responsible,” but pretty much every party says that nowadays.

It’s unclear what the future of the Greens will be. It is fashionable for the media to predict a Green party “breakthrough” in the next election, but they’ve been saying this for a long time and it never actually happens. People who would vote for the Green Party are probably people who are most likely to vote for the NDP, and the NDP has been quite skilled at out-maneuvering them, as a result, co-opting environmental issues and even making green one of their official party colors.

The Greens blame their lack of success on a political system that is biased against them. The leader of the Green party has often been shut out of candidates’ debates, and the Canadian electoral system does in fact underrepresent the party in parliament. It’s thus unsurprising that electoral reform is one of their biggest pet causes. More honestly, however, the party probably fails to be popular because it does not really fill a void in the existing Canadian political culture.

*In 2008, Blair Wilson, a disgraced MP who had been kicked out of the Liberal Party and was sitting as an independent, joined the Green Party of Canada, technically making him the first Green MP, though he was not elected as such.

Dead Parties

From 1867 to 1917 politics in Canada was dominated exclusively by the Liberals and Conservatives. Then in the aftermath of the First World War the two-party system was thrown into a bit of disarray, and new parties began to spring up both nationally and provincially. The two most important to emerge from this period would be the Social Credit Party and the United Farmers Party, though neither of these parties are still around today.

Farmers’ Parties

In the early 20th Century Canada was still a largely agrarian nation, and farmers were very politicized, with their own political parties and unions. The hardships of the Great Depression moralized them even more, and during the 1920’s and 30’s the Farmer’s parties enjoyed a great deal of popular support.  Ontario was governed by the United Farmers’ of Ontario from 1919 to 1923, Alberta was governed by the United Farmers of Alberta from 1921 to 1935, and Manitoba was under farmer rule the longest of all, from 1922 to 1948.

The Progressive Party of Canada was the federal wing of the farmer’s movement, and held a strong third-place status in the national parliament from 1921 to 1926. Generally speaking, the farmers championed (predictably) agrarian economic issues, such as an increase in designated farmlands and high tariffs to protect their domestic markets. They were also a working-class populist movement, who opposed elite control of government and sought to infuse greater democracy and accountability into the political process. There was a socialist tint to much of what they did as well, and many of their leaders would go on to careers in the NDP later in life.

When the Great Depression wound down the farmers movement lost a lot of its traction. In 1942 the Progressive Party merged with the Conservative Party, and that’s why they were called the “Progressive Conservatives.”

The Social Credit Party

The Social Credit party was an important party in Canadian federal politics from the late 1920’s to the early 1980’s, and was even more important at the provincial level in British Columbia and Alberta. But then the Social Credit Party just died, which I have always found a bit odd. Literally, it’s just not around at all anymore. People just stopped caring.

“Social Credit” was originally a kooky Depression-era monetary theory dreamed up by some Scottish economist. It involved printing new forms of currency to give poor people, thus giving them “social credits” or something. It doesn’t really matter, because people realized Social Credit theory was an unworkable crackpot scheme quite quickly. But during the depression people thought it was clever, so some Social Credit political parties were formed. Then, once Social Credit theory went out of favour, the political parties ditched the theory but lived on, evolving into generic right-wing populist parties.

For much of its existence, Social Credit was the party of the working class and the religious; those who resented establishment politics but were also turned off by the socialism of the NDP. In this respect they were rather similar to the Reform Party of later years (see above). Indeed, prior to his party’s founding, Reform leader Preston Manning had been a loyal Socred (as followers were called), as had his father, who served as Social Credit Premier of Alberta for over two decades.

From the 1930’s to the 1970’s the Socreds would win about 10-20 seats in the Canadian parliament, often vying with the NDP for third-place status, and sometimes the balance of power as well. Their base was particularly strong in rural Quebec, back when religious and social conservatism were much more important values to French-Canadians than they are today.

Socred fortunes began to decline in the 1970’s, and in the 1980 election the Social Credit lost all its seats in parliament, and never elected another. In a large part they were a victim of strategic calculations; in an effort to keep the Liberals out of power conservative voters found it more prudent to support the Progressive Conservatives rather than split the vote with another right-wing party. The party also went through a great deal of internal turmoil following the 1976 death of their popular leader Real Caouette.

Provincially, the Socreds governed Alberta for 32 straight years, from 1932 to 1967. But then the Progressive Conservative Party grew in power and unseated them, and in 1982 they lost all their seats in the Alberta parliament.

In British Columbia, the party hung around a lot longer, governing from 1952 to 1972, and then from 1975 to 1991. They then lost all their remaining seats in the 1996 election.

The party just faded away after these loses, and one never hears about Social Credit anything anymore.

Provincial parties

In most cases, provincial politics are dominated by the same parties we see at the federal level, though to a smaller extent. Provinces in Canada generally operate under a two-party system, usually between the NDP and the Conservatives, or the Liberals and Conservatives, as you can see on this chart. Despite no longer existing nationally, the Progressive Conservative party still exists at a provincial level in many provinces. Sometimes, as in Alberta, it is allied with the federal Conservative Party of Canada, while in other provinces, such as Newfoundland, it does not, and may actually oppose the CPC.

Few parties are not terribly consistent across the country, and the parties lack a strong central organization to keep them all united, and singing from the same book. For example, in Saskatchewan and Manitoba the NDP is fairly conservative, especially on economic issues, ditto for the Liberal Party in BC. Voters in Canada generally understand that the federal parties are not the same as the local versions, so it is not unusual to vote one way federally and another way provincially.

Provincial-exclusive parties

Some provinces feature (or did feature) powerful political parties that do not even exist at the federal level. In most cases these are conservative parties that arose in opposition to the provincial Progressive Conservatives.

The ruling party in Saskatchewan is the creatively-named Saskatchewan Party. It’s basically a conservative party that was founded in the late 90’s after the Progressive Conservative Party collapsed into scandal. Leading right-wingers no longer wanted to be associated with the PCs, so they formed a new party to supersede it, and were highly effective at doing so.

In New Brunswick, right-wingers upset with the moderate nature of the Progressive Conservatives formed the right-wing Confederacy of Regions Party. It briefly replaced the PCs as the main conservative party in the early 1990’s and formed the official opposition in the parliament before proceeding to lose all its seats in the 1995 election. The New Brunswick PC party eventually came back, but the CRP collapsed amid in-fighting.

The Yukon Progressive Conservative Party reformed itself into the Yukon Party in the early 1990’s, out of dislike for the unpopular and moderate Progressive Conservative Party that was ruling Ottawa at the time. They are currently in power.

The main right-wing party in Quebec used to be the Union Nationale, which governed for most of the 1940’s through to the 1960’s. It was a highly traditionalist, Catholic-right party that was dominated for most of its history by premier Maurice Duplessis, a very hardline reactionary fellow.

In the 1981 Quebec election the UN lost all its seats, and officially abolished itself shortly after. Right wingers in Quebec then had to satisfy themselves trying to either influence the Quebec Liberal Party or the separatist Parti Quebecois, which controlled the province’s two-party system from the 1970’s to late 1990’s.

Then, in 1994 Quebec conservatives got tired of this and founded a new party called the Action Democratique, or ADQ. They won a few seats here and there, but they didn’t make a full breakthrough until 2007, in which they won 41 seats and became the official opposition, unseating the Parti Quebecois. The ADQ is basically libertarian, but also supports Quebec nationalism, as is pretty much mandatory for all Quebec parties.