Progressive Conservative Party of Canada
The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was a centre to centre-right federal political party in Canada that existed from 1942 to 2003.
From Canadian Confederation in 1867 until 1942, the original Conservative Party of Canada participated in numerous governments and had multiple names. In 1942, its name was changed to the Progressive Conservative Party under the request of newly elected party leader Premier John Bracken of Manitoba, a former member of the Progressive Party of Manitoba. In the 1957 federal election, John Diefenbaker carried the party to their first victory in 27 years and the following year, led the party to the largest federal electoral landslide in history. During his tenure, human rights initiatives were achieved, most notably the Bill of Rights. In the 1963 federal election, the party lost power and would not regain it until 1979, when Joe Clark led the party to a minority government victory. The party lost power just nine months later and in 1983, Clark lost his leadership role to Brian Mulroney, who helped the PC Party gain popularity in Quebec. Mulroney won back-to-back majority governments in 1984 and 1988, and during his tenure, major economic reforms such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the goods and services tax were introduced.
The GST, the government's failed attempts to revise the Constitution with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, and the early 1990s recession, led to the party's increasing unpopularity and eventual collapse in the 1993 federal election where they won just two seats. In Western Canada the bulk of the party's support transferred to the right-wing populist Reform Party, while in Quebec support shifted to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois. The Progressive Conservatives failed to recover much lost ground in the subsequent 1997 and 2000 federal elections. When it became clear that neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the Canadian Alliance could on their own defeat the incumbent Liberals, an effort to unite the right-of-centre parties emerged. Eventually, in 2003 the party membership voted to dissolve the party and merge with the Canadian Alliance to form the current Conservative Party of Canada.
Like their British counterparts, members and supporters of the Progressive Conservative Party were known as "Tories". Provincial variants of the Progressive Conservative Party continue to exist in a number of provinces.
Predecessors
The party pre-dates Confederation in 1867, when it accepted many conservative-leaning former members of the Liberal Party into its ranks. At Confederation, the Conservative Party became Canada's first governing party under Sir John A. Macdonald. The federal Tories governed Canada for over 40 of the country's first 70 years of existence.However, the party spent the majority of its history in opposition as the nation's number-two federal party, behind the Liberal Party of Canada. From 1896 to 1993, the Tories formed government six times—from 1911 to 1921, briefly in 1926, from 1930 to 1935, from 1957 to 1963, from 1979 to 1980 and from 1984 to 1993. It stands as the only Canadian party to have won more than 200 seats in an election—a feat it accomplished twice: in 1958 and 1984.
The party adopted the "Progressive Conservative" name in 1942 when Manitoba Premier John Bracken, a long-time leader of that province's Progressive Party, agreed to become leader of the federal Conservatives on condition that the party add Progressive to its name. Despite the name change, most former Progressive supporters continued to support the Liberal Party of Canada or the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and Bracken's leadership of the Conservative Party came to an end in 1948. Many Canadians simply continued to refer to the party as "the Conservatives".
A major weakness of the party since 1885 was its inability to win support in Quebec, estranged significantly by that year's execution of Louis Riel. The Conscription Crisis of 1917 exacerbated the issue. Even though the Conservative Party of Quebec dominated politics in that province for the first 30 years of Confederation at both the federal and provincial levels, in the 20th century the party was never able to become a force in provincial politics, losing power in 1897, and dissolving in 1935 into the Union Nationale, which took power in 1936 under Maurice Duplessis.
In 20th-century federal politics, the Conservatives were often seen as insensitive to French-Canadian ambitions and interests and seldom succeeded in winning more than a handful of seats in Quebec, with a few notable exceptions:
- the 1930 federal election, in which Richard Bedford Bennett surprisingly led the party to a thin majority government victory by securing 24 seats in rural Quebec;
- the 1958 federal election, in which John Diefenbaker rode the backing of the right-leaning Union Nationale provincial government in Quebec to 50 of the province's 75 seats; and
- the federal elections of 1984 and 1988, when party leader Brian Mulroney, a fluently bilingual Quebecois, built an electoral coalition that included Quebec nationalists.
Several loosely associated provincial Progressive Conservative parties continue to exist in Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. As well, a small rump of senators opposed the merger, and continued to sit in the Parliament of Canada as Progressive Conservatives. The last one of them rescinded their party status in 2016. The Yukon association of the party renamed itself as the Yukon Party in 1990. The British Columbia Progressive Conservative Party changed its name to the British Columbia Conservative Party in 1991. Saskatchewan's Progressive Conservative Party effectively ceased to exist in 1997, when the Saskatchewan Party formed – primarily from former PC Members of the Legislative Assembly with a few Saskatchewan Liberal MLAs joining them.
Ideology
The Progressive Conservative Party was generally on the centre-right on the political spectrum. From 1867 on, the party was identified with Protestant and, in Quebec, Roman Catholic social values, British imperialism, Canadian nationalism, and constitutional centralism. This was highly successful until 1920, and to that point in history, the party was the most successful federal party in the Dominion.As such, Canadian conservatism historically initially more closely resembled that which was practiced in the United Kingdom and, to an extent, Europe, than in the United States. The "Tory" approach worked well for the party until 1917, when, as was common among 19th-century conservative movements, Canadian Tories opposed the rollback of government intervention in social and economic matters advocated by the liberals of the era. In contrast to "American conservative" counterparts, however, they did not undertake as dramatic an ideological turnaround in the first half of the 20th century by continuing to follow mercantilism and nascent notions of the welfare state.
Like their federal Liberal rivals, the party defined itself as a "big tent", welcoming a broad variety of members who supported relatively loosely defined goals. Unlike the Liberal Party, there was a long history of ongoing factionalism within this tent. This factionalism arose from the party's lack of electoral success, and because the party often reached out to particular political groups in order to garner enough support to topple the Liberals. These groups usually remained semi-autonomous blocs within the party, such as Quebec nationalists and western Canadian Reformers in the 1980s. In later years, observers generally grouped the PC Party's core membership into two camps, "Red Tories" and "Blue Tories".
Red Tories tend to be traditionally conservative, that is, "Tory" in the Disraelian sense in social policy, placing a high value on the principles of noblesse oblige, communitarianism, and one nation conservatism—and were thus seen as moderate in their economic policy. For most of their history they were trade protectionists, engaging in free-trade economics in only a limited fashion, as in Empire Free-Trade. Historically they comprised the largest bloc of the original Canadian Conservative party. Notable Red Tories include John Farthing, George Grant, John Diefenbaker, E. Davie Fulton, Robert Stanfield, Dufferin Roblin, Dalton Camp, W. L. Morton, George A. Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts, William Davis, Peter Lougheed, Joe Clark and Flora MacDonald.
Blue Tories, on the other hand, were originally members of the Tory elite drawn from the commercial classes in Montreal and Toronto. Prior to World War II, they were generally conservative in social policy, and classically liberal in economic policy. From 1964 on, this cadre came to identify more with neoliberal influences in the US Republican Party, as espoused by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and the Thatcherite leadership in the British Conservative Party, as represented by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. They have come to be termed—in the Canadian lexicon—as neoconservatives. However, there are also Blue Tories who identify strongly with the monarchy in Canada and other traditional institutions. In Canada, Blue Tories include Ralph Klein and Mike Harris.
From 1891 until the party's dissolution, Red Tories generally dominated the highest rungs of the party and its leadership. The emerging neoconservatives of the 1970s were significantly reduced in numbers in the party by the late 1980s, and many of the disaffected drifted towards neoliberalism and parties with a neoconservative bent, such as the Reform Party of Canada. When the PC party held power at the federal level, it never truly embraced Reaganomics and its crusade against "big government" as vociferously as was done in the United States.
Canadian neoconservatives lean more towards individualism and economic liberalism. Support for the Canadian Alliance and its predecessor the Reform Party of Canada derived principally from this group, and that support carried forward into the new Conservative Party of Canada. The success of the neoconservative movement in using the label "Conservative" has brought into debate the very definition of conservatism in Canada today. Although adhering to economic philosophies similar to those originally advanced by 19th-century liberals, the Canadian Alliance agreed to the name "Conservative Party of Canada" for the new party.