Elections are markers in a nation’s political history. They provide occasions, both practical and symbolic, when a collective political decision is rendered by the citizenry. Long after they occur, they also provide important reference points for significant political events or periods of political, social or economic change. The 1896 and 1968 elections that inaugurated the Laurier and Trudeau eras were two such major political turning points. Election results can sometimes be decisive, as in the “landslide” elections that occasionally thrust one party into a dominant position. Canada has experienced this type of outcome in elections such as those of 1940, 1958, and 1984 (see Table 1.1).
Such decisive victories are often interpreted at the time as a clear expression of the national will, but they do not always inaugurate a long era of dominance for the winning party. In reality, they sometimes owe as much to the operation of our electoral system as to the wishes of the voters. In the most recent of these dramatically one-sided elections (1984), the winning Progressive Conservatives received barely half of the total votes cast.1 And nine years later, the Parliamentary caucus of the PCs was reduced to two members.
An Overview of Canadian Federal Elections, 1867–2008
Election outcomes can also be indecisive, sometimes making the formation of a government difficult and creating an atmosphere of political uncertainty. Minority governments such as those elected in 1957, 1962, 1979, or 2004 lasted only a short time before the public was asked to render a verdict in another election. In the past, minority results have sometimes paved the way for majorities, as in 1925, 1957, and 1972. At other times, they have led to reversals of electoral fortune, as happened after the 1979 and 2004 elections.
The electoral system plays a role in producing these minority outcomes as well. The Progressive Conservatives, for example, who formed a minority government following the 1979 election, received four percent fewer votes in that election than did the Liberals, but substantially more seats.2 In the 2006 federal election, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada received about the same percentage of votes (36.3 percent) as Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in 1979 (35.9 percent). In both instances, the party that assumed office held the confidence of barely more than a third of the Canadian electorate, but formed a minority government nevertheless.
Over the course of Canadian history, electoral patterns have sometimes become established that persisted over several consecutive elections. Typically, these elections have ushered in long periods of relative political stability, which we will refer to throughout this book as political dynasties.
There have been a number of instances in Canadian political history when the same party held power for a considerable length of time, often under the same prime minister. But these long periods of dominance by one party, so significant to historians today, would not necessarily have been regarded as imminent at the time they began. The 1993 election, for example, brought about one of the greatest political upheavals in Canadian history, devastating the then governing Progressive Conservatives and thrusting two new political parties — Reform and the Bloc Québécois — onto the federal scene (see Chapter 11). As it happened, the period following 1993 proved to be one of remarkable political stability, with Jean Chrétien winning three consecutive majority governments before yielding power to Paul Martin in 2003. Similarly, Mackenzie King’s tenure in office began during a period of turmoil following the First World War, a time of great social change both in Canada and in many other countries.
King first gained power with a minority government in 1921, an election which also saw the Progressives win 64 seats — one of the most successful “third party” surges in Canadian history. Winning fewer seats and substantially fewer votes than the Conservatives in the following election of 1925, King nevertheless clung to power, yielding office briefly to Arthur Meighen, but recovering to win a majority of seats in the election that took place less than a year later.3 Despite that victory, few would have predicted at that time that King would go on to lead the most successful political dynasty in Canadian history. But, when he finally retired in 1948, King had served a total of 22 years as prime minister, his long tenure in office interrupted only by the three months that Meighen served as prime minister in 1926 and by R.B. Bennett’s single term in office (1930–35).
Brief departures from long periods of political stability, such as the Bennett government, we refer to here as interludes. Political scientist Peter Regenstrief first used this term in the Canadian context when he titled his analysis of the Diefenbaker years “The Diefenbaker Interlude.”4 At the height of Diefenbaker’s success in 1958, it was not generally anticipated that the Liberals would be back in power only a few years later. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that analysts of that period of Canadian politics were able to recognize the Diefenbaker regime as an interlude in an otherwise long period of Liberal hegemony, first under King and St. Laurent, and later under Pearson and Trudeau.5 In the aftermath of his 1958 landslide, Diefenbaker’s political prospects would have appeared very different to his contemporaries (see Chapter 4).
In this book, we will advance the thesis that Canadian politics has repeatedly followed these patterns — long periods of political hegemony under successful political leaders, punctuated by short, sharp interludes that disrupted what seemed at the time to be a one-dimensional political success story. Nearly all of Canada’s successful political leaders have had this experience. Macdonald lost power to Mackenzie’s Liberals in the election of 1874, but regained it in the following election and continued on to head Canada’s first political dynasty until his death in 1891. Laurier, who became prime minister in the transformative election of 1896 and retained his majority in each of the next three (1900, 1904, and 1908), lost an election to Borden in 1911. Mackenzie King’s political dynasty was interrupted twice over a long period, by the Meighen and Bennett interludes, respectively. Having passed power on to Louis St. Laurent in 1948, the Liberal dynasty begun by King continued until Diefenbaker upset it in 1957. But Diefenbaker’s landslide victory in the election a year later proved to be short lived, in spite of the size of his parliamentary majority. Reduced to a minority government in 1962, Diefenbaker was out of office in 1963, replaced by the two successive minority governments of Lester Pearson. Pearson’s successor, Pierre Trudeau, consolidated a new Liberal dynasty with a decisive electoral victory in 1968 but suffered a setback in the near defeat of 1972.
Trudeau went on to lead one of the more successful political dynasties in modern Canadian history. Regaining a majority government in 1974, Trudeau’s tenure in office was also punctuated by a short interlude of defeat in 1979 (see Chapter 8). But the minority government of Joe Clark itself went on to electoral defeat only nine months later, placing Trudeau once again at the head of a majority government. When he retired from office in 1984, Trudeau had served a total of 15 years as prime minister, a tenure equivalent to that of Laurier and surpassed only by King (22 years) and Macdonald (18 years).
Chrétien’s dynasty lasted 11 years, and might conceivably have continued further had Paul Martin and his supporters not pushed him out of office in 2003.6 Martin’s two years in office can be thought of now primarily as an extension of the Chrétien dynasty, of which Martin was a key part until the onset of the “civil war” between these two camps within the Liberal Party (see Chapter 13).
Library and Archives Canada.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier campaigning in Exeter, Ontario, 1904 election.
Five Elections That Established New Political Dynasties
Six Elections That Failed to Establish New Dynasties
The election in 2006 of a minority Conservative government under Stephen Harper could ultimately prove to be either an interlude (albeit one including two election victories), or the beginning of a new dynasty, depending upon Harper’s continued success in repositioning his party along the key issue dimensions of Canadian federal politics — an enduring characteristic of all successful dynasties that we will discuss in some detail throughout this book.7
In the chapters following, we will highlight the rise and fall of five major political dynasties: those of John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, who shaped so much of Canada’s early political history; William Lyon Mackenzie King, whose dynasty continued for another nine years through the succession of Louis St. Laurent; Pierre Trudeau, representing a long period of Liberal governance begun by Lester Pearson in 1963 and punctuated only by the short-lived Clark government of 1979–80; and Jean Chrétien, whose three consecutive election victories beginning in 1993 extended a period of Liberal dominance with a fourth election won by Paul Martin in 2004.
The establishment of these dynasties was not a simple matter. While each of the periods described above started with a decisive election victory, the new pattern established in that election was tested in the one following. Often, given the inherent volatility of Canadian electoral politics, the existence of the dynasty could not be confirmed until a third election demonstrated the staying power of both the party and its leader (see Table 1.2).
In the cases of both Mackenzie King and Pierre Trudeau, the test that occurred after their initial election was a dramatic one. King lost the election of 1925, but managed to remain in power for eight months before yielding to Arthur Meighen, whom he defeated more decisively in the subsequent election (1926). Trudeau’s election victory in 1968 was followed by near defeat in 1972 (see Chapters 6 and 7). Only after his political recovery in the 1974 election would it have been possible to discern the shape and durability of a “Trudeau dynasty.”
Such patterns suggest that to understand electoral politics in Canada, it is essential not to put too much emphasis on the interpretation of a single election. Instead, it is important to place elections within the context of a somewhat longer and more complex process of political and social change and of the evolution of political leadership.
The interludes to which we refer throughout this book also contain many elements of complexity. A few, such as the single-term governments of Alexander Mackenzie (1874–78) or R.B. Bennett (1930–35) are readily demarcated. Likewise, the nine-month administration headed by Joe Clark (1979–80) represents a typical interlude, with Pierre Trudeau being returned to power decisively in the election of 1980. But others are not so readily classified. The Borden government elected in 1911 might not have lasted so long had its term not first been extended by the war and then subsequently by the election of a wartime Unionist government in 1917. Historically, it now appears as an extended interlude, in spite of the decisiveness of the 1911 and 1917 elections, both of which we will examine in greater detail in Chapter 2.
The Diefenbaker and Mulroney periods are likewise complicated segments of Canadian electoral history. Given their one-sided election victories (Diefenbaker in 1958, Mulroney in 1984), both of these leaders had the potential to establish new political dynasties. Mulroney in particular had the clear determination to do so. But, for a number of reasons that we will explore in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 11 respectively, neither Diefenbaker nor Mulroney was able to translate his dramatic election victory into the type of lasting political success attained by King or Trudeau (see Table 1.3). Despite the 1958 landslide, Diefenbaker failed a crucial electoral test in the election of 1962, and his government was defeated a year later. Mulroney, in contrast, won a difficult re-election in 1988, but was ultimately unable to either hold on to power himself or to pass the leadership on to a successor who could do so.
Had the political and economic events of the early 1990s unfolded differently, there could well have been a “Mulroney dynasty.” We could argue that the 2008 election likewise represented a crucial electoral test for Stephen Harper. But the continuation of minority government and the persistent strength of the Bloc Québécois makes the possible emergence of a “Harper dynasty” doubtful. However, judgments about a “Harper interlude” are equally suspect, or at least premature.
Of course, we should not consider elections only in the context of political leaders, important as these may be, both in establishing dynasties and in interrupting them. Elections can also be critical or watershed events, representing major societal turning points and reflecting deep-seated processes of political and social change. “Critical” elections, as they are sometimes called by political scientists, reflect deep underlying patterns of social and economic change. Such elections often bring with them both new issues and new ways of thinking about politics. They also create realignments in the support base of the parties.
The American scholar V.O. Key, examining the important U.S. election of 1932, which ushered in the “New Deal” era of American politics, argues that the patterns of social and demographic change that could be observed in America in the previous decade of the 1920s had as much or more to do with the election of Roosevelt as did the actual political events of 1932.8 The enduring effect in American politics was to bring working class voters to the Democratic side of the American political spectrum.
The federal election of 1917 was a traumatic event in Canada, in which the campaign generated unprecedented levels of ethnic antagonism, opening deep wounds which, some might say, never fully healed.9 But it was the changing social and political environment of the time that precipitated these developments, as much as any of the issues, candidates and events associated directly with the election itself. And many Unionist voters that sustained the Borden government in 1917 did not continue thereafter to support the Conservatives.
The election of 1945 saw the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) make a major electoral breakthrough, winning 28 seats, mainly in the Prairie provinces. The CCF, which had been founded in Regina in 1933 as a farmer-labour based socialist movement, forced the other parties to come to terms with the reality of social class relations.10
Occurring at the same time as Labour’s accession to power under Clement Attlee in Britain, the 1945 election drew attention to important patterns of post-war social change that were occurring both in Europe and North America. In that same election in Canada, the strong showing of the Bloc populaire in Quebec (two seats with 12 percent of the Quebec vote) provided an early indication of the future growth of Quebec nationalism.11 Later events, such as Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s and René Lévesque’s unexpected provincial victory in 1976, demonstrated that some of these early signs of change in the old political alignments were more than transient phenomena, and that they would have enduring consequences in the evolution of federal politics.
We do not explicitly employ a “critical elections” framework of analysis in this book, in part because we believe that this approach tends to place undue emphasis on the issues and events associated with a single election. Also, when connected explicitly to concepts such as “realignment,” as is done in some of the American studies cited above, it can imply a degree of partisan stability that is absent in Canadian federal politics.12 Even though one party has sometimes been able to hold power for long periods of time, this success has not been based on solid groups of supporters voting for the party time after time. Nevertheless, we would have no difficulty in recognizing important elections such as those of 1896 or 1993 as “critical” elections within the traditional meaning of this particular theoretical approach.13 Such elections represented major turning points in Canada’s politics, even if the underlying causes of some of the changes that they embodied lay well beyond the confines of the election campaign.
Elections can also be examined for their role as important reference points for changes in the party system, which in turn determines the types of choices that are available to citizens when they vote in an election. Canada’s first party system, which lasted into the early part of the twentieth century, was a largely two party affair reflecting both the characteristics of early Canadian society and the constraints imposed by the electoral system, which makes it difficult for minor parties or new political movements to gain parliamentary representation. Canada evolved under this basic structure of a two-party system during the first 50 years after Confederation. Conservatives and Liberals reflected in part the ethnic and sectarian divisions of early Canadian society, and also developed strengths in particular regions of the country. As we will show in this book, the Conservatives advocated protection of Canadian industries during much of this period, while the Liberals supported various versions of free trade with the United States.
While there were sporadic “third party” interventions in elections as early as 1896,14 the 1920s and 1930s saw a series of new movements and parties contest Canadian federal elections. The first of these was the Progressive Party, a Western farmers’ movement which elected 64 members in 1921. Later the CCF and Social Credit became major political players in Canadian elections. As a result, there existed a “two-and-a-half” party system for most of the next 70 years, although the Liberals were dominant throughout much of that time.
The established pattern of “two and a half” party politics survived the events of the 1958 landslide, in which John Diefenbaker swept away much of the basis of the old party system, firmly anchoring the Progressive Conservatives to Western Canadian support. It also survived the phenomenon of “Trudeaumania” in 1968, when Trudeau brought the country into what seemed to be a “new politics” during the period of rapid social and cultural change now commonly associated with the 1960s. The competition in the dramatic election of 1988, focused around the historic Free Trade Agreement with the United States, was also between the Conservatives, the Liberals and the NDP. Things were to change shortly thereafter. The “earthquake” election of 1993 all but destroyed the old Progressive Conservative party, and brought two newcomers — the Bloc Québécois and Reform — to the political scene in its place.
The effects of that dramatic election still reverberate in the political life of Canada today. Kenneth Carty divides the historical patterns into three distinct periods — the first party system before 1921, the second that began with the election of King and the rise of the Progressives in the 1920s, and a third configuration which commenced with the defeat of the Liberals in 1957–58.15 According to this interpretation, Canada in the 1990s may have begun to evolve into a “fourth” party system, beginning with the collapse of the Conservatives in 1993 and the rise of the Bloc and Reform.
This new party system, if it is indeed distinctive from those of the past, may eventually become more like some of the multi-party systems found in many European countries. Alternatively, it may represent only part of a transition to something quite different, as it goes through an extended process of “rebuilding” following the 1993 cataclysm.16 However, the events of elections from 2004 onward suggest that the merger of the Canadian Alliance with the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives has been at least partially successful in replicating some previously successful Conservative electoral strategies. If the new Conservative Party of Canada should increasingly come to resemble previous Conservative alignments, and the Bloc eventually begins to recede, we may well come to question how different this “new” party system really is from those of a somewhat more distant past. There are, in other words, elements of continuity as well as change that are clearly visible in today’s system of political parties.
Over the course of Canadian history, there have been relatively few occasions where the political parties have chosen to form and fight along the territorial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, or class cleavages that have long been a part of the Canadian social fabric. In the Canadian federal state, the composition of the nation and the relative power of the provinces, have been issues of continuing importance which still are not settled. Some analysts have suggested that the Canadian preoccupation with issues of national unity, ethnic relations, and federal–provincial negotiation has inhibited the emergence of an electoral politics of social class or ideology.17
Canadian political parties have traditionally been brokerage parties.18 Lacking stable support groups in the electorate, and avoiding clear ideological differentiation from their competitors, political parties approach each election anew, hoping to put together a coalition of support across the entire electorate. Brokerage parties do not seek to appeal in election campaigns on the basis of long-standing principles, or on a commitment to fundamental projects to restructure the economy or society, even if they have these. They are not bound by positions or actions they have taken in the past. Electoral platforms are typically put together from a short-term point of view, offering a mixture of assurances of general competence to deal with the major problems of the day, commitments to prosperity and social security, specific promises designed for instant appeal, and an assertion that only they can provide creative leadership.
Certain types of regional and ideological divisions have become more apparent over the past two decades, as the political parties became more regionalized and, in the process, less competitive outside their own core areas of support. Today, it remains uncertain whether political parties will be able to continue the historic pattern of acting as “brokers” between the diverse elements of Canada’s multicultural society, or whether they will continue to fragment into narrower expressions of specific regional, linguistic, or ideological interests.
Not all scholars writing about Canadian political parties agree that Canadian political parties are brokerage parties, either in the political world of the past or in the present day. For Political Scientist David Smith, the arrival on the scene of John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau marked a new “pan-Canadian approach” which transformed the Liberals and Conservatives more into parties of principle, in the process becoming both more leader oriented and more programmatic.19 Kenneth Carty likewise sees the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of significant departure from these earlier traditions of Canadian party politics, but characterizes it somewhat differently. In his view, the period after 1963 emphasized “electronic politics” (with the rise of television) and gave greater prominence to the role of the party leader (“personal parties”).20
Our position in this book is that recent electoral campaigns such as those run by the Mulroney Conservatives (1984–93) and the Chrétien and Martin Liberals (1993–2004), or even the Harper Conservatives in 2006 and 2008, continue to fit the brokerage model quite well, although there are some contradictory trends that are also in evidence. The Reform Party in the late 1980s (with its slogan “the West wants in”) and the Bloc Québécois, which now routinely casts itself as the party of Quebec,21 appeared to emphasize regional interest above all else. As the Reform Party transformed itself into the Canadian Alliance prior to the 2000 election, it began to place ideology above region in its quest to “unite the right.” Both instances would seem to run strongly counter to the tradition of brokerage parties as it has existed through much of Canadian history. In the 2004 election, the newly formed Conservative party, created from the 2003 merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, showed signs of returning to the brokerage tradition more associated with its predecessors. The result of the 2004 election suggested that this initial attempt failed, as the new party at that time seemed largely unable to escape its regional and ideological past (see Chapter 13). However, the 2006 and 2008 elections yielded a new and more electorally successful turn, with the Conservatives winning both of those elections with a more centrist strategy.
Conservative Party of Canada. Herman Cheung, photographer.
Stephen Harper and Laureen Harper with campaign plane, 2008 election.
While there is still considerable uncertainty about the future of the Canadian party system in this new political environment, the fact remains that it has more often than not demonstrated a tendency to revert to the brokerage model — a characterization that extends back through much of Canadian electoral history. In part, the reason for this tendency is that brokerage has long been associated with electoral success, while parties and leaders that have attempted to emphasize region, ideology or class interests have not been nearly as successful over time, or have enjoyed a degree of political success only during brief interludes.
The main argument in this book centres around the various ways that Canadian political parties structure the choices available to the voter in an election.22 In Canada, the parties have had considerable freedom in this regard because they have typically tended to eschew long-term ideological commitments and are thus better able to manoeuvre strategically in choosing issues and emphases in any given election campaign. The particular ways in which parties attempt to structure the voting choice in any given election are often dependent on short-term strategic choices of issues and the appeal of the current party leaders. However, the parties are not totally free to structure electoral choice in any way that they wish. They are constrained by a set of factors traditionally associated with the Canadian political landscape, and which commonly recur in electoral appeals.23 They must be well positioned on the key economic questions of the time, have public confidence on issues of national integration, and, since the Depression, be in favour of expanding or at least preserving the welfare state.
Lest we think these factors are of recent vintage, consider the views of André Siegfried, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century about elections in Canada:
In all electioneering programmes [in Canada] there are certain points upon which the politicians lay stress, instinctively as it were, because they know them to be calculated to impress public opinion; and nothing throws more light upon the real spirit of a constituency than the kind of language addressed to it by the candidates, its licensed flatterers. In this chapter we shall study the arguments of a general character which the Canadian election organizers are most given to invoking, and which ensure victory to their party when they can make out their claim with sufficient plausibility. They are four in number: the defence of one of the two races or of one of the two religions against the other; the prosperity of the country; the promise of public works or material local advantages; and the personal prestige of the party leader.24
The “prosperity of the country,” the need to promote economic growth and a pledge to attack any problems that may appear to be threatening it, has always been an important part of Canadian electoral discourse. In any election, parties will attempt to structure choices to their advantage around economic issues. To some extent, they are free to espouse specific economic policies which they consider advantageous, as the Conservative Party did with the National Policy under Macdonald in 1878, the Little New Deal under Bennett in 1935, Wage and Price Controls under Stanfield in 1974, and the Free Trade Agreement under Mulroney in 1988. In many cases, however, these were responses to larger economic problems which have thrust their way onto the electoral stage. American domination, recession or depression, inflation, unemployment, government debt — whatever the threat to Canadian economic prosperity — political parties promise solutions, whether specific or general, in order to persuade the public that they are the ones who should be trusted to deal with the complex matters of economic policy.
“The defence of . . . race . . . or . . . religion” identifies a second constraint on Canadian electoral politics, though not necessarily in the way invoked in the quotation. Siegfried saw a communal appeal as a kind of “ultimate weapon” of Canadian politics, one which “fortunately, though . . . always latent, does not always manifest itself in outbreaks of anger.”25 We can conceptualize this constraint, then, as a necessity for parties to decide whether to appeal along, or across, racial, ethnic, religious or regional lines. Often in the past, the parties, whether defending their principles or seeking short-term electoral advantage, have opted to structure their appeal across cleavage lines, in particular to accommodate Quebec. The accommodation of Quebec has provided some vestiges of internal structuring in Canadian parties, placed constraints on cabinet selection, and influenced strategic decisions on election issues. For a considerable part of Canadian electoral history, the success of one party in appealing to Quebec as part of a national community (first the Conservatives, then the Liberals) has structured important elements of federal electioneering. The appeal of the Bloc Québécois to represent the province (or at least the francophone majority thereof) along cleavage lines in elections since 1993 reversed this historic pattern, and caused other parties to react by making strategic decisions of their own to deal with ethnic and linguistic relations, either in an accommodating manner or in a more antagonistic one.
Attempts by the major parties to accommodate the West have over time been less successful than with Quebec, and that region has spawned several new parties which have from time to time altered or disrupted the Canadian party system. Starting in 1921 with the Progressives, then in 1935 with the CCF and Social Credit, and later in 1993 with Reform, several new political parties have arisen as representatives of the West, and structured their appeals along regional lines. The strategic question of whether to continue to act as a regional party or to aspire to become a national entity has bedeviled all of these parties.
The Canadian Alliance’s attempt to break out of this pattern in the 2000 election was only marginally successful. Its Conservative successor did better in this regard in the elections after 2004, but still faced the dilemma of balancing its desire to act as a true representative of western grievances with its ambition to form a national government. The decision to act solely as a regional party is a momentous one, since it would appear to involve abandoning the ultimate ambition of forming a government. In fact, such political movements of the past (e.g. Social Credit, the Progressives) have generally faded over time, or been absorbed by the major parties. Reform’s quest to find a “united alternative,” beginning in 1997 and continuing under the Alliance banner in 2000 and the Conservative one after the 2003 merger, eventually came to display an awareness of the fact that even successful regional parties in Canada must grow and change in order to survive. Whether the Bloc can prove the exception to this strong historical pattern remains one of the most intriguing questions of the current political era, since the Bloc, unlike the Alliance, does not have the option of transforming itself into a Canadian “national” party.
A third important factor in the electoral campaigns of all major Canadian parties is the need to extend, maintain, improve, or defend the welfare state. This factor represents a more modern extension of the emphasis that Siegfried in the era in which he was writing placed on “public works.” The modern variation on this theme stems from the policy consensus which developed after the Great Depression of the 1930s establishing that it was a responsibility of the state to provide a “social safety net.”
During and after the Second World War, a number of programs were put in place to create such a framework for social policy — unemployment insurance, welfare, health insurance, medicare, and pensions. Not all of these were established by the federal government, and their implementation often involved controversy. However, their popularity with the public meant that their acceptance needs to be stated with assurance by political parties during election campaigns, regardless of any desires they might harbour for substantially changing or even replacing such programs. Brian Mulroney’s reference to social programs as a “sacred trust” during the 1984 election campaign provided such assurance to voters at the time, but came back to haunt him later when he sought to implement changes in pension and welfare policies. The accusation by the Liberals in the 2004 election campaign that the new Conservatives under Stephen Harper had a “hidden agenda” favouring tax cuts at the expense of social programs was in part directed toward this same end. Any attack on the welfare state that might be in the policy plans of politicians cannot easily be acknowledged in elections, even in the name of financial prudence, without serious repercussions.26 The incorporation of welfare state measures into their electoral programs is the price that mainstream parties have had to pay to prevent sharp class divisions from arising in Canadian elections.27
Canadians have not, at least in more recent times, tended to be constrained in their voting choices by powerful social or ideological cleavages, or by strong partisanship. This has allowed the parties to appeal to voters across lines of ethnicity, regionalism, or social class as noted earlier, even though such appeals are not always successful in any given election.
Since the time of the first major surveys in 1965, scholars have observed that the Canadian electorate as a whole has tended to exhibit relatively weak ties to political parties and therefore exhibits considerable volatility in elections.28 Unhindered by past feelings of party loyalty, many voters feel free to choose which party to support on the basis of such short-term factors as the particular issues of the day, their assessment of the state of the economy, the characteristics of the party leaders, or the likelihood of effective representation from a local candidate.
Such a pattern contrasts quite markedly with some of the more ideologically driven party systems of European countries or with the more party-identified electorate of the United States. In their study of the 1974 Canadian electorate, Clarke et al. classified only about a third of the Canadian electorate as durable partisans, whose support could generally be relied upon by their party of choice in any given election. The remaining two-thirds were flexible partisans, whose support in a given election could in many instances be won or lost on the basis of shorter-term factors.29
Of course, the actual movement of voters between elections may often be less than these figures would seem to imply. But given the implications of a weakly aligned electorate, political parties have long been well aware that they cannot count on the continued support of a loyal band of followers in order to win elections. The sudden reversals of party fortunes that have occurred in elections such as 1972, 1979, 1984, 1993, or 2006 demonstrate this point convincingly. The relative freedom from sociodemographic constraints that Canadian parties enjoy is thus a mixed blessing for them. On the one hand, political parties are able to fashion new appeals and seek new sources of support as opportunities arise. But they also know that even many seemingly “loyal” supporters can quickly turn against them if they become disillusioned.30 This explains both the periodic tendency toward sudden and sharp electoral reversals, but also the ability of parties over time to recover from adversity and adapt to new political circumstances.
Images of Canadian Political Parties, 1974–1984
Data on the types of images which Canadians hold of the political parties (See Table 1.4) shows why it is possible for parties to reinvent themselves from time to time in this way. Relatively few voters hold images of the parties that are tied to ideology, group or regional alignments, or simple partisanship. Many more form their images of the parties based on the particular policies or issues that they embrace at a given time, party performance (particularly when in office), and feelings about the party leaders. Thus, a change in leadership is often instrumental to a party in renewing its image with the electorate. The period of change that occurred in both major parties in the late 1960s demonstrates this strategy clearly. As the Diefenbaker–Pearson era came to an end, voters gradually wearied of their entrenched personal and partisan rivalry which had played out over the course of four elections. With the ouster of Diefenbaker and the selection of Robert Stanfield as leader in 1967, the Conservatives quickly gained electoral advantage, as evidenced by the public opinion polls of the time (see Chapter 6). But this advantage proved to be short-lived, as the Liberals soon began their own period of renewal with the selection of Pierre Trudeau as leader in 1968. Within a period of barely more than a year, both major parties had acquired entirely new images to present to the electorate.
The set of issue constraints on political parties introduced in this section provides a framework that will be used throughout this book in explaining why political parties win or lose elections. In addition, sustained mastery of the three issue areas of economic, national unity, and social welfare issues provides the key to the reasons why some political leaders and their parties have been able to establish dynasties that stand the test of time, while others have not.
Two other important dimensions of electoral contests in Canada are that they are parliamentary elections, and that the Canadian government is a party government. The votes cast in federal elections are for individual candidates within constituencies, sometimes called “ridings,” the number of which has risen from 181 in 1867 to 308 in 2008. No matter how popular or unpopular the party leaders may be, the real electoral contest is the one between the parties to obtain a majority of seats in the House of Commons. Political parties as organizations are essential to the Canadian electoral process, and they form the structural backbone of Canadian government.
Canadian elections are not “presidential,” as in the United States or France.31 Party leaders, no matter how prominent, must organize teams of candidates to fight elections throughout the country if they hope to form the government. A national organization must be sustained and put into full operation at regular intervals. Parties attempt to nurture a positive public image for themselves, which they can later draw upon at election time. Leaders play a role in this process, but they are not the sole actors. Nevertheless, in a television age, the leader often defines much of a party’s image. Sometimes, this can be a deliberate part of a party’s electoral strategy, as exemplified by the Liberals’ characterization of their campaign as “Team Martin” in the 2004 election. During the Trudeau years, many felt that the leader himself personified the Liberal party. In more recent years, leaders have been less often cited as the primary reasons for voting choice.32
The electoral system is vital to the operation of this process. Although Canadian electoral procedures have changed over time, and the electorate has expanded, this has occurred for the most part within the context of the single member electoral district, “first past the post” framework.33 The basic form of our electoral system was inherited from Britain and, in spite of extensive criticisms of it, has remained in place throughout our entire history.34 These electoral rules have had a number of important effects on the outcome of elections and, since they are well-known to parties and politicians, they have also affected the way in which campaigns are organized.35 The most clearly identifiable effect has been the tendency of the system to produce governments with large parliamentary majorities but narrower electoral pluralities.36 Prominent examples of “majority” governments elected with relatively modest proportions of the total vote, all of which will be discussed later in this book, include the federal elections of 1945, 1974, 1993, and 1997.
In the most recent of these (1997), the Liberals formed a majority government with just over 38 percent of the vote, the lowest such total in Canadian history. In Canada, single member plurality (SMP) also distorts regional representation, and gives an electoral advantage to political parties that are able to concentrate their votes in one province or region of the country, generally at the expense of parties with a broader national appeal. In recent elections, the Bloc Québécois has been a clear beneficiary of this characteristic of the electoral system, and the NDP has been repeatedly disadvantaged by it. Parties such as Reform in 1997 or the Canadian Alliance in 2000 have experienced both the advantages and disadvantages of this distortion of representation. They have swept disproportionate numbers of seats within their own dominant region, but have been unable to win seats in other parts of the country even when gaining a significant percentage of votes. In 2000, for example, the Alliance won 24 percent of the popular vote in Ontario, but managed to win only two of the province’s 103 seats in that election. As a result, it continued to be perceived as a largely “western” party, in spite of what otherwise might have been interpreted as a relatively strong performance in Canada’s largest province.
In principle, the SMP electoral system simplifies political choice for the voter. Canadian voters under this system cast only a single vote for a local candidate. Since smaller parties can rarely break through to win in many constituencies, the tendency is for voters to shy away from “wasting their votes” by casting ballots for them, and thus for fewer such parties to be sustained over long periods of time. The Green Party fielded candidates in 303 of the 308 constituencies in the 2008 election, obtaining 6.8 percent of the total vote but no parliamentary seats. The larger political parties in Canada have frequently capitalized on public awareness of the tenuous position of smaller parties, urging voters to make a clear choice between those parties that have the potential to form a government instead of supporting smaller or newer parties. Such appeals for “strategic voting” may have made some difference in the 2004 election when it was evident to many voters that a vote cast for the NDP or the Greens might have the perverse effect of electing a Conservative government.37 It is also not uncommon for a major party to make “majority government” into an election issue, as the Liberals did in 1965 and 1974, in each case following two years of a minority administration.
Whatever the electoral context, Canadian voters, unlike their American, German, or French counterparts, have only a single vote to cast, and in the end they must decide whether to cast it sincerely or strategically, and whether to place the emphasis on the party as a whole, the party leader, or the local candidate. There is no such thing in a Canadian election as a “split ticket.”
The thesis of the supposed “simplification” of the party system produced by the electoral system runs into difficulty, however, when the regional nature of Canadian politics is taken into account. Rather than being disadvantaged, regionally based smaller parties have sometimes taken advantage of the ability to win disproportionate numbers of seats by concentrating their appeal in a particular province or region. Two Quebec examples of this have been the Créditistes, which emerged with surprising strength in the House of Commons in 1962 because of concentration in one geographical area of the province, and the Bloc Québécois, which became the Official Opposition after the 1993 election, despite contesting the election only in Quebec. Thus, rather than maintaining a national party system by discouraging smaller parties, the electoral system may actually be partly responsible for producing the opposite effect in Canada — a more regionalized party system.
Some political parties in recent years have chosen to appeal to the electorate as representatives of geographical or territorial cleavages in the country, and have been rewarded with substantial numbers of parliamentary seats for so doing. In contrast, parties with a broader national following, such as the NDP, or the Progressive Conservatives after 1993, have been severely disadvantaged by the operation of the electoral system. However, the regional nature of the Canadian system extends beyond such extreme cases. Even under more normal electoral circumstances, parties have at times depended on large regional blocks to form government. This was certainly the case with Diefenbaker who won 42 seats in the Prairie provinces in 1962, or Trudeau, who won 74 out of the 75 Quebec seats in 1980, or more recently with Chrétien who won 101 of 103 Ontario seats in 1997.
Another important consideration when studying elections in Canada is the changing composition of the electorate. The post-Confederation electorate was a relatively restricted one. Until 1885, the franchise was under the control of the provinces. Most provinces followed the doctrine that the right to vote should be restricted to those men who had acquired a certain amount of property or wealth. However, there were some differences in electoral qualifications. For example, New Brunswick required a man to have $400 in annual income in order to qualify, but did not link this to the ownership of property. Nova Scotia, however, required the ownership of property worth $150, but no minimum annual income. Ontario required both a minimum annual income of $250, and ownership of property worth $200 in the cities and $100 in rural areas. Only British Columbia imposed no property or income requirements.38
British Columbia, while egalitarian on the income dimension, led the way in the imposition of racial restrictions on voting eligibility. That province banned not only Indians (as did Ontario and Manitoba) but also immigrants of Chinese origin. It was also common to deny the vote to certain categories of provincial government employees, such as judges, sheriffs, land registrars, and tax collectors. But here again there were inconsistencies. In Nova Scotia workers in the post office were specifically prohibited from voting while in British Columbia they were specifically included in the electorate. In Quebec and Ontario, rural postal workers could vote whereas those working in cities and town could not.
In 1885, the Conservative government of John A. Macdonald succeeded in passing a bill giving the federal government control of the franchise, ostensibly in order to eliminate the kinds of inequities described above. In fact however, this legislation contained a potpourri of income and property qualifications, which differentiated urban from rural areas and owners from tenants of property.39 It raised the levels of such qualifications in Nova Scotia and Manitoba, and imposed them for new voters entering the electorate in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, where they had heretofore been absent. Macdonald’s self-described “greatest triumph” was a piece of legislation intended largely to benefit his own party through the property qualifications, favouritism to rural areas, and the continued exclusion for racial reasons of virtually all Indians and Chinese.40 After the Liberal party won the 1896 election, they promptly gave the franchise determination back to the provinces again, prohibiting them “from excluding a citizen, otherwise qualified to vote, from exercising the right to vote on the grounds that he practiced a particular profession or carried on a particular occupation, worked for the federal government or a provincial government, or belonged to any class of persons.”41 This last clause was intended to provide voting rights to Canadians of Asian origin, but British Columbia attempted to get around it by enacting a provision that voters had to be able to read the Elections Act in English. Discrimination by British Columbia against voters of Asian origin was reimposed in 1920, and was not finally ended until 1948.
The Canadian electorate has increased from a few hundred thousand eligible voters in the years after Confederation to well over twenty million in 2008.42 The pattern was one of gradual growth commensurate with the increase in population until the elections of 1917 and 1921. Prime Minister Robert Borden, heading a Unionist coalition government of Conservatives and non-Quebec Liberals, made two strategic moves to enhance his chances of winning the 1917 election. The first was to count separately the votes of the military who were overseas fighting the First World War and allow the government to assign their votes to any place they had previously resided or failing that to a riding chosen by the government — all this to be done a month after the election.43 The second was to grant the vote to all spouses and female relatives of servicemen.
The 1917 act also removed the power to enumerate voters and construct the voters’ lists from the provinces and gave it back to the federal government. While Borden sought to gain political advantage through extension of the franchise, the changes in the electorate and electoral laws that took place in this period reflected more than mere political calculation. In particular, the strength of the suffrage movement made voting rights for women all but inevitable after the end of the war. Following its victory in the 1917 election, the Borden government introduced the Dominion Elections Act, which enfranchised all female citizens, resulting in the doubling of the size of the electorate. In the 1921 federal election, Agnes Macphail became the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons. The Dominion Elections Act of 1920 also provided for the appointment of the first Chief Electoral Officer, and established many of the norms for the conduct of elections in the modern era. The next large jump in the composition of the electorate came with the extension of the vote to 18–21 year olds, which came into force with the federal election of 1972. Immigration has also contributed over time to changes in both the size and composition of the Canadian electorate, as has internal movement of the population between cities and provinces.
In the period between 1867 and 2008, Canadians went to the polls in national elections 40 times, plus another three times in referendums — a total of 43 occasions in all. The average turnout in federal elections was 70.1 percent of eligible voters, although this figure conceals a substantial amount of dispersion around it.
The zenith of Canadian electoral participation came during the Diefenbaker and Pearson years, with a 79 percent turnout registered in the elections of 1958, 1962, and 1963. For the most part, turnout in elections during the Trudeau and Mulroney years was also well above average, leading to a general expectation that about three-quarters of eligible voters would cast their ballots at any given election. A study done for the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing made optimistic projections regarding electoral participation suggesting that, with some administrative changes to make the actual voting process easier, turnout could well rise above the 80 percent mark.44
Ironically, however, despite the implementation of some minor measures toward this end, voting turnout has been declining steadily in recent years, dropping to 67 percent of registered voters in the election of 1997 and recording an historic low of less than 59 percent in 2008. Although turnout rebounded slightly to just under 65 percent in the 2006 election, evidence suggests that it remains unlikely to return to the levels of the 1970s and 1980s, and could well decline further in future elections in spite of new efforts on the part of the electoral authorities and other interested groups to stimulate greater participation in elections.
According to recent research, the decline in voting turnout that has taken place over the past two decades is attributable largely to the failure of newly eligible young voters to enter the active electorate in numbers commensurate with their proportion of the total population.45 In contrast, older voters continue to participate in about the same proportions as in the past, and are also living longer and remaining more active in social and political affairs. Taken together, these two trends suggest an electorate that is growing older and shrinking in size (at least as a proportion of the total population). Political parties are thus encouraged to target their appeals more directly to those segments of the population most likely to participate in elections. The emphasis in recent elections on the issue of health care shows that parties tend to target their electoral appeals toward those Canadians who are the most likely to vote, rather than to the population at large.
The fact that such a large proportion of eligible voters fails to cast a ballot in any particular election also means that there is considerable movement into and out of the electorate from one election to the next. In spite of the sustained decline in turnout of recent years, there have in the past been relatively few Canadians who never voted in elections. Rather, many non-voters were in reality “transient” voters, who could be mobilized on some occasions but not others. In crafting their campaign strategies, parties thus sought to appeal across the broader electorate — to persuade their previous supporters to trust them again, to woo those people who voted for their opponents, and to try to attract back into the electorate many less-interested voters who did not cast a ballot last time. This necessity to appeal across the board contributes to the amorphous and insubstantial nature of many party campaign strategies. And that in turn risks discouraging some previous voters who may come to feel that voting is not meaningful.
In Canadian elections, there is little doubt that campaigns matter. Since parties cannot rely on cadres of supporters to come out and vote for them time after time, they must assemble at least partly new coalitions on each occasion. Much strategic thinking goes into the choice of which issues to emphasize in a campaign. Big economic problems facing the country force themselves onto the electoral agenda, and necessitate a response from the parties. However, most major parties prefer to treat such problems on a high level of generality and stress their capacity to tackle them rather than to announce a specific program to implement a solution. Policies that are too specific have the potential to alienate as many voters as they attract. The fate of parties proposing specific policy responses like Reciprocity in 1911, the Little New Deal in 1935, Wage and Price Controls in 1974, or the Green Shift in 2008 has not been a happy one. In the 1988 election, the Mulroney Conservatives attempted to define the campaign issue, not as the just-negotiated Free Trade Agreement with the United States, but as “managing change,” a vacuous phrase which appeared to mean nothing much more than “trust us.” Over the course of the campaign however, the continuing controversy over the Free Trade Agreement forced it to the centre of the campaign agenda of all of the parties (See Chapter 10).
When it comes to smaller scale issues, party promises can have an impact, as exemplified by the Liberal Red Book in the 1993 election campaign. Strategically, this package of detailed policy proposals allowed the Liberals to argue that after nine years in government, the Conservatives did not have any plan for the future, in contrast to themselves. As a policy manifesto, the Red Book strategy had many shortcomings, but as a campaign strategy, it was highly effective (See Chapter 11). A similar observation can be made about the Conservatives’ Five Point Program in 2006.
Techniques of electoral persuasion have changed dramatically in the years since Confederation. As implied in the quotation from Siegfried (see page 36), “the promise of public works or material local advantages” was an important element in the campaign strategy of governing parties for many years. Once political leaders in the pre-Confederation colonies had wrested control of the state away from the officers of the British Crown, they fell heir to all of the techniques of manipulation and patronage that went with their positions and gained control of the resources to implement them.46
Historian Gordon Stewart identifies Macdonald and Laurier as the great masters of patronage politics. Both established elaborate clientelist networks whereby local notables competed for material benefits for their areas, and dispensed gifts or “treats” to entice voters. The electoral politics of personal gain and group gain provided the lens through which policy proposals like the National Policy and Reciprocity were viewed.47
Early techniques of electoral influence involved personal contact with local patrons and subsidiary brokers. For those who could read, the print medium provided a powerful source of electoral persuasion. Newspapers were invariably partisan, and exhorted their readers to support one or another of the competing parties or candidates. Pamphlets and posters, often with graphic illustrations, helped the parties to get their points across. As the twentieth century unfolded, techniques of political campaigning evolved as well. With the filling out of the geographical shape of the country, the growth of population and the increased size of cities, came a change in the operating procedures of political parties. It was no longer possible for elaborate networks of local operators to mobilize votes to the same extent. Although patronage did not disappear as a means of attracting voters, it was on a larger scale, favouring regions rather than localities. In particular, the governments of Mackenzie King created a system of regional ministers who distributed patronage in order to attract votes in all areas of the country for the Liberal party.48 More and more voters were being reached directly through the communications media instead of indirectly through local operatives. Newspapers increased their circulation and their professionalism and were no longer as closely identified with partisan positions on the news pages.49 The new medium of radio was used for the first time in the election campaign of 1930 by Mackenzie King and R.B. Bennett. From that time forward, leaders could make direct oratorical appeals to the Canadian public at large.
Media politics took a gigantic leap in 1957 with the first election campaign in which television played a key role. The main beneficiary was Progressive Conservative leader John Diefenbaker who, unlike Liberal leader Louis St. Laurent, “took well to the new medium.”50 The early television broadcasts were free-time allocations to the parties, generally featuring a talk by the leader. From this point on, television gradually took over the major role in linking the public with the campaign, with free-time broadcasts fading in importance in comparison with appearances on nightly news programs and interview shows, together with carefully crafted campaign advertisements. The activities of professional behind-the-scenes campaign strategists were a novelty when Alistair Grosart ran the Conservative campaign of 1957 and Keith Davey the Liberal campaign of 1963, but these have since become commonplace. Teams of strategists now direct election campaigns, supported by extensive public opinion polling to test prospective messages before they are introduced and to monitor their effectiveness along the way. Where election campaigns were once fought at the constituency level between groups of party workers, today they are fought largely on television, between leaders who are advised by campaign professionals.
Leaders have played an important role in Canadian electoral politics, as Siegfried also noted at the dawn of the previous century.51 Not only have they been the primary spokespersons for their parties during the campaign, but they have directed the strategy of the parties in planning the themes of the campaign. In large part, this has been because of the nature of the parties themselves. Those wishing to form a national government have had to tie together a broad organization capable of campaigning throughout the country without the “glue” of a distinctive ideology. By default, the glue has been the personal appeal of the party leader, together with the power that a successful leader would inherit if victorious in the election — power to distribute offices and favours to those working alongside. Party leaders have also become an important part of a party’s identity in the minds of voters. Lacking strong ideological or policy driven images, the personality of a leader imprints itself easily on that of the party. One important side effect of this tendency toward a leader driven politics is that parties have been better able to adapt to adversity by merely changing the leader. Such a strategy of course has not always been successful. While the Liberals revived their flagging electoral fortunes with the selection of Pierre Trudeau in 1968, their attempt to do the same with John Turner in 1984 proved disastrous for the fortunes of the party.
Although party leaders have been central to shaping the images of their parties, the appeal of the leader to the electorate has been a complex one. A few prominent prime ministers with a claim to the adjective “charismatic” (Macdonald, Laurier, Diefenbaker, Trudeau) have attracted large numbers of votes through the force of their own personalities. For many others, however, it is more likely to have been the content of a leader’s message that produced the votes rather than the personality of the messenger. The advent of leaders’ debates in the 1968 election campaign and their institutionalization since the 1984 campaign has given leaders greater campaign exposure, and has also meant that the leaders are well briefed on current issues, and well rehearsed in the techniques of presenting their points of view.52 Debates have plenty of “content,” and leaders are able to use these occasions to advance their parties’ strategic plan for the campaign.53 In modern election campaigns, the leader debates have become the centrepiece of the campaign, and one of its principal events. But, as the dramatic events of 1988 demonstrated, other campaign factors above and beyond the leader debates can also play a critical role in determining election outcomes.
In Canada, as in other democratic countries, the structure of election campaigns continues to evolve, driven both by new technologies and changing styles of political communication.54 In recent campaigns, the internet has begun to play an important role in the process of communication between parties, candidates, and voters. Over time, such changes will undoubtedly have significant effects on the nature of electoral campaigns, as have those of the past involving the advent of radio and television, or the use of campaign debates or negative election advertising.55 Yet many of the fundamental principles of election campaigning remain the same. Political parties and their leaders compete for the votes of the citizens, and their success or failure is determined in the course of that process of competition. Politicians who take Canadian voters for granted do so at their peril.
In every election, “the people speak.” But in the aftermath of the vote, a voice can often be heard to whisper: “but what did they say?” How can a myriad of individual voting decisions ever be interpreted as a collective act? This question has always been a thorny one for democratic theorists.56 Representative democracy sees elections primarily as a mechanism for choosing leaders and rendering public officials accountable for their actions. While elections can sometimes provide a certain degree of policy direction to those in charge of the machinery of government, rarely if ever does an election serve as a “referendum” on a detailed program of public policy, either established or proposed. The choice of one party or another to form a government implies only in a very limited way a collective decision on the substance of what that party stands for. Policy mandates have been difficult to achieve in Canadian elections, even when the campaign discourse has dealt with important issues regarding the country’s economic, social, or constitutional future.57 For this reason, advocates of more direct forms of democracy often argue in favour of holding separate referendums on major questions of public policy, viewing elections as too imperfect a tool to provide true policy choices.58 Many commentators of the time, for example, considered the election of 1988 to be the equivalent of a “referendum” on the Free Trade Agreement, which had been negotiated in the year preceding the election by the Mulroney government. But had the Agreement been put to an actual referendum, it almost certainly would have been defeated (see Chapter 10). Thus, while elections can have policy implications and consequences, they cannot always be interpreted in issue terms. Voters, in the end, cast their votes for a party and candidate, and not for a policy agenda. In modern election campaigns, avoiding specific policy commitments is as likely to be a part of a party’s electoral strategy as embracing them.
Voting in elections is often “retrospective” — i.e. looking to the recent past rather than the future.59 Canadian voters are adept at “throwing the rascals out” when they have become disillusioned with those in power. Many of the interludes referred to in this book have come about in this way, when voters opted to punish a governing party by defeating it in an election. Such electoral interludes were often read at the time as major turning points, but they sometimes proved to be nothing more than a timely rebuke to a party in power. Opposition parties that have benefited from such circumstances have sometimes misread the mood of the electorate as conferring a larger policy mandate, as the short-lived Clark government did in 1979. But such mandates, even when they appear to exist, can be fleeting endorsements. Canadian voters have only a single weapon at their disposal, and they tend to deploy it against any government that fails to perform up to their expectations.
Political parties play this electoral game from the other side, seeking whatever formula may seem to promise victory. Issues become vehicles through which to appeal to the voters rather than commitments to be turned into policies. It seemed not to bother the Liberals in their 2004 campaign that they promised to initiate a daycare program that had originally been promised in the 1993 Red Book. Similarly, the Conservative campaign took little heed of criticisms that its promised program of tax cuts appeared to be at variance with its commitment to sharply increased spending on health care and defence.
In Canadian election campaigns, shuffling the issue agenda is sometimes the only way that parties can avoid being trapped in their own inconsistencies on policy matters. Yet, it is also true that the most successful political parties and leaders over the course of Canadian history — those that have been able to construct dynasties rather than being rejected by the voters after a short interlude — have been those best able to navigate the constraints imposed by the underlying realities of the Canadian polity. To be successful over time, they must master the demands imposed by the need to foster economic prosperity, maintain national unity, and sustain a modern welfare state. Leaders such as R.B. Bennett or John Diefenbaker, who failed on one or more of these fundamentals, were confined by the voters to rather short periods in office, in spite of their initial electoral successes. The circumstances of the time may also play a role in determining success or failure. Brian Mulroney, who following his 1984 electoral landslide appeared to understand the constraints imposed in all three of these areas, nevertheless eventually fell victim to both the recession of the early 1990s and the failure of his two bold constitutional initiatives — the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. What might have been a new political dynasty instead became an interlude, and in the process his party was destroyed as well.
In the remaining chapters of this book, we will explore the evolution of Canadian party politics through an examination of the 40 federal elections that have taken place since Confederation. These elections can be grouped into several distinct periods of Canadian political history, demarcated by particular configurations of party hegemony, specific issues, or dominant leaders. Remarkably, two of the political parties that contest federal elections today have the same names as the ones that fought Canada’s first elections, although today’s Conservatives are clearly not the same party that John A. Macdonald led in the years following Confederation. The Liberals also have undergone extensive changes in their approach to politics over the years, yet they have survived in spite of severe electoral setbacks such as those of 1958 or 1984. The story of party politics in Canada, as we will see, is in many respects one of adaptability and change. As Peter Mair has observed, political parties in the established western democracies have often shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to new political and social circumstances, as well as a keen instinct for political survival.60 An electorate with fundamentally weak ties to parties and a demonstrated high degree of electoral volatility such as the Canadian one will always contain within itself the potential for sudden and dramatic change. Yet, despite a high degree of electoral turnover, the major Canadian parties have for the most part adapted and survived. Even the Conservatives, following the disastrous election of 1993, found new political life through their merger with the Canadian Alliance and returned to power with a minority government in 2006.
In previous work, we have noted that there is considerable issue volatility from one election to the next.61 Political parties are often able to reshuffle the issue agenda in any given election in an effort to put together a winning political coalition in the short term. Yet it is also true that the same types of political issues — economic prosperity, national unity, social welfare — recur with considerable regularity over time. Parties or leaders that fail in one of these policy areas can sometimes recover and adapt, as King did in 1935 or Trudeau in 1980. But electoral circumstances, or the electorate itself, are not always forgiving of failure on the part of a party or leader to balance these sometimes competing interests. It was often said of them at the time that Diefenbaker never really understood Quebec, or Trudeau the West.62 Yet one leader was able to overcome a major political setback and return to power, while the other was not.
Just as Canada’s old parties adapt and change, new players have appeared from time to time on the political scene that did not exist in the early years of Confederation. But there is continuity even here. In part because of the tendency of the major parties to occupy the same political turf by representing similar sets of political ideas at any given time, the door has often been opened to “third” parties of both the left and right, or to parties expressing regional discontent. While movements of the past such as the Progressives, Social Credit, CCF, or Bloc populaire may appear to bear only superficial similarity to the NDP, Reform, or Bloc Québécois, it is clear that certain basic clusters of ideas and interests have recurred in varying forms throughout the history of Canadian electoral politics. As Maurice Pinard noted in his classic study of the rise of Social Credit in Quebec, the emergence of “third” parties in Canada has often been related to the weakness of the traditional opposition party in particular parts of the country.63 In Quebec prior to 1984, the weakness of the Conservatives was largely a function of that party’s traditional identification with “English Canada,” creating electoral opportunities first for the Bloc populaire and later for Social Credit. In the West, support for the wartime Union government blurred the distinction between the major parties, opening the door to the rise of the Progressive, CCF, and Social Credit movements. In recent years, the weakness of one of the major parties in Quebec and in the West created similar opportunities for the Reform party and the Bloc Québécois. The new parties, as they have arisen, have sometimes served as vehicles of political protest, but they have also been a source of renewal and change.
The 1993 election, which we will consider in more detail in Chapter 11, appeared to pose a fundamental challenge to our traditional understanding of a party system which seemed over the years to exhibit a remarkable capacity to survive and adapt. In this watershed election, the forces of volatility and discontent evident within the Canadian electorate in recent years suddenly manifested themselves in an entirely new way. The Conservative party, which only five years earlier had succeeded in winning a second consecutive majority government, was not only defeated in its bid for a third term but thoroughly decimated. The two new parties which rose to prominence in that election seemed overnight to have transformed the Canadian political world into something very different. Yet as we view that election with the benefit of over a decade of additional hindsight, it is clear that the process of adaptation is already well advanced. The 1993 election was after all won, not by any of the new parties, but by the Liberals, who over the course of the twentieth century have been Canada’s most successful political party. Only twenty years ago, the Liberal Party itself seemed to teeter on the edge of the political precipice. But today, in spite of recent electoral setbacks, it remains highly competitive. At the same time, the 2003 merger of the seemingly moribund Progressive Conservatives with the Canadian Alliance has created a political entity which is both new and old, and has restored the fortunes of the political grouping in Canada that can trace its roots back to John A. Macdonald. As the analyses in this volume will demonstrate, the past can provide important keys to understanding both the present and future shape of party politics in Canada. “Change” is a fact of everyday life, but the underlying continuities and the fundamental characteristics of the political world in which it occurs, are often equally important.
1. The highest of these three elections was 1958, in which the winning Progressive Conservatives received 53.6 percent of the total votes cast.
2. The Progressive Conservatives won 136 seats on 35.9 percent of the vote in the 1979 election. The Liberals obtained only 114 seats while gaining 40.1 percent of the total votes cast.
3. Although King’s parliamentary majority rested on the support of a dozen members elected as “Liberal-Progressives” in 1926. See Chapter 3.
4. Peter Regenstreif, The Diefenbaker Interlude (Toronto: Longman’s, 1965).
5. Often our dynasties as defined here involve more than one leader, e.g. King/St. Laurent, Pearson/Trudeau, Chrétien/Martin, etc.
6. On the Martin–Chrétien “civil war,” see John Gray, Paul Martin: The Power of Ambition (Toronto: Key Porter, 2003) and Susan Delacourt, Juggernaut: Paul Martin’s Campaign for Chrétien’s Crown (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003). See also the more extensive discussion of this period in Chapter 13.
7. Of course, it is also possible that we have entered an entirely new political era, in which the creation of a “dynasty” similar to those of the past may no longer be achievable. We will consider this possibility in greater detail in Chapter 14. On the prospect that minority government may endure for some time under current conditions, see Peter Russell, Two Cheers for Minority Government: The Evolution of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2008). See also the analysis and evaluation of the October 2008 parliamentary crisis in Peter Russell and Lorne Sossin (eds.), Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
8. V.O. Key, “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, 17 (1955), 3–18. See also Geoffrey Evans and Pippa Norris, Critical Elections: British Parties and Voters in Long-Term Perspective (London: Sage, 1999), and Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (NY: Norton, 1970).
9. See John English, The Decline of Politics: The Conservatives and the Party System, 1901–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
10. On the founding and growth of the CCF, see Walter Young, The Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF, 1932–61 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
11. Founded in 1942 in reaction to the national plebiscite on conscription, the Bloc populaire canadien ran candidates in both federal and Quebec provincial elections until 1949. In the 1944 provincial election in Quebec, it won 4 seats with 14 percent of the vote.
12. On the treatment of these issues in the United States, see James L Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington D.C.: Brookings, 1983). See also Byron Shafer (ed.), The End of Realignment?: Interpreting American Political Eras (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
13. See, for example, Donald L. Blake, “1896 and All That: Critical Elections in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 12 (1979), 259–80.
14. The 1896 elections saw two such political movements based in Ontario. One was led by D’Alton McCarthy, and was dedicated to the proposition that English should be the sole language of speech and education for Canada. The second, the Patrons of Industry, came into Canada from the United States, and championed the interests of the agrarian sector in co-operation with industrial workers.
15. “Three Canadian Party Systems,” in R.K. Carty, ed., Canadian Political Party Systems: A Reader (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1982), 563–86.
16. R. Kenneth Carty, William Cross, and Lisa Young, Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000).
17. See Robert Alford, Party and Society (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), and John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), for some of the classic academic statements of these themes. On the weakness of class politics in Canada, see Jon H. Pammett, “Class Voting and Class Consciousness in Canada,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 24 (1987), 269–90.
18. On this theme, see Harold D. Clarke , Jane Jenson, Lawrence LeDuc, and Jon H. Pammett, Absent Mandate: Canadian Electoral Politics in an Era of Restructuring (Toronto: Gage, 1996), 15–21. See also Janine Brodie and Jane Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change: Party and Class in Canada Revisited (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988).
19. David E. Smith, “Party Government, Representation and National Integration in Canada,” in Peter Aucoin, ed., Party Government and Regional Representation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
20. Carty, “Three Canadian Party Systems,” 576–84.
21. In the 2004 campaign, the Bloc’s slogan was “un parti propre au Québec.” In its 2006 campaign advertising, it used the phrase “ici, c’est le Bloc” to convey the message of its identity with Quebec interests.
22. On this theme, see especially Peter Mair, “Party Systems and Structures of Competition,” in Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris (eds), Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1996), and Leon Epstein, Political Parties in Western Democracies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980).
23. On the topic of constraints on political parties, see William L. Miller and Richard G. Niemi, “Voting Choice, Conditioning, and Constraint,” in Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris (eds), Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting (London: Sage, 2002), 169–88.
24. André Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 207.
25. Ibid., 169.
26. See Raymond Blake, Penny Bryden, and J. Frank Strain (eds), The Welfare State in Canada: Past, Present and Future (Concord, ON: Irwin, 1997).
27. Brodie and Jenson, Crisis, Challenge and Change.
28. See Fred Engelman and Mildred A. Schwartz, Political Parties and the Canadian Social Structure (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1967), and John Meisel, Working Papers on Canadian Politics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1975).
29. Harold D. Clarke, Jane Jenson, Lawrence LeDuc, and Jon H. Pammett, Political Choice in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), 301–19. For a comparison of patterns of partisan attachment in Canada, Britain, and the United States, see Lawrence LeDuc, “Partisan Change and Dealignment in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States,” Comparative Politics 17 (1985), 379–98.
30. For example, Clarke et al. estimate the extent of switching between the parties in the 1984 election at 28 percent. In 1993, however, with the collapse of the Progressive Conservatives and the rise of the new parties, the comparable figure rises to 51 percent. Absent Mandate: Canadian Electoral Politics in an Era of Restructuring, 105–09.
31. On the significance of this seemingly obvious point in the contemporary political environment, see Jennifer Smith, “Parliamentary Democracy versus Faux Populist Democracy,” in Peter Russell and Lorne Sossin, eds., Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 175–88.
32. In 2006, for example, 23 percent said that party leaders were the most important factor in voting, while 24 percent chose local candidates, and 53 percent cited parties taken as a whole. See André Turcotte, “After Fifty-Six Days . . . the Verdict,” in Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, eds., The Canadian Federal Election of 2006 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006), 292.
33. The exceptions have been dual-member ridings in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia. In all of these, voters were given the same number of votes as there were members to be elected. On the electoral system more generally, see Dennis Pilon, The Politics of Voting (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2007). See also J. Paul Johnston and Harvey E. Pasis, eds., Representation and Electoral Systems: Canadian Perspectives (Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1990).
34. The recent experiment in New Zealand, in which the traditional SMP model was replaced by a system of mixed member proportional (MMP) representation is of particular interest to Canadians who have been critical of some of the effects of the SMP model in Canada. For a discussion and synthesis of some of these arguments, see Henry Milner, Making Every Vote Count: Reassessing Canada’s Electoral System (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1999).
35. See Alan Cairns, “The Electoral System and the Party System in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 1 (1968), 55–80, for the classic statement of this argument.
36. André Blais, “The Debate Over Electoral Systems,” International Political Science Review 12 (1991), 239–60, and André Blais and Louis Massicotte, “Electoral Systems,” in LeDuc, Niemi and Norris, Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting (Toronto: Sage, 2002).
37. See Chapter 13. See also Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan (eds), The Canadian General Election of 2004 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005).
38. On the history and evolution of the Canadian electorate, see Elections Canada, A History of the Vote in Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services, 1997).
39. Elections Canada, A History of the Vote in Canada, 49.
40. Gordon T. Stewart, “John A. Macdonald’s Greatest Triumph,” Canadian Historical Review 33 (1982), 3–33.
41. Elections Canada, A History of the Vote in Canada, 52.
42. The number of eligible voters in the 2008 election was 23,677,639. Elections Canada. Accessed at www.elections.ca.
43. Elections Canada, A History of the Vote in Canada, 58.
44. Jon H. Pammett, “Voting Turnout in Canada,” in Herman Bakvis (ed), Voter Turnout in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991).
45. For an analysis of this recent trend, see Jon H. Pammett and Lawrence LeDuc, Explaining the Turnout Decline in Canadian Federal Elections: A New Survey of Non-Voters (Ottawa: Elections Canada, 2003). See also Lawrence LeDuc and Jon H. Pammett, “Voter Turnout in 2006: More Than Just the Weather,” in Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, eds., The Canadian General Election of 2006 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2006).
46. See Gordon T. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics: a Comparative Approach (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), and S.J.R. Noel, Patrons, Clients and Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791–1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
47. Jon H. Pammett, “A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Elections Across Time and Space,” Electoral Studies 7 (1988), 125–42.
48. Herman Bakvis, Regional Ministers: Power and Influence in the Canadian Cabinet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
49. W. H. Kesterton, A History of Journalism in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967).
50. John Meisel, The Canadian General Election of 1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
51. André Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada, 168–77.
52. There were no televised debates in 1972, 1974, or 1980. However, televised debates between the leaders, both in English and French, have been held continuously since 1984.
53. Lawrence LeDuc, “The Leaders’ Debates . . . (And the Winner Is . . .),” in Alan Frizzell and Jon H. Pammett (eds), The Canadian General Election of 1997 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997).
54. On this issue, see Pippa Norris, On Message: Communicating the Campaign (London: Sage, 1999). See also David Farrell, “Campaign Strategies and Tactics,” in LeDuc, Niemi and Norris, Comparing Democracies.
55. Ann Dale and Ted Naylor, “Dialogue and Public Space: An Exploration of Radio and Information Communication Technologies,” Canadian Journal of Political Science (2005), 203–25.
56. See, among other sources on this point, David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
57. Clarke et al., Absent Mandate: Canadian Electoral Politics in an Era of Restructuring.
58. See, for example, Patrick Boyer, The People’s Mandate: Referendums and a More Democratic Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992).
59. On this theme, see Morris Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
60. Peter Mair, “Myths of Electoral Change and the Survival of Traditional Parties,” European Journal of Political Research 24 (1993), 121–33.
61. Clarke et al., Absent Mandate: Canadian Electoral Politics in an Era of Restructuring.
62. See, for example, Peter C. Newman, Renegade in Power (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1963), and Richard Gwyn, The Northern Magus (Toronto:McLelland & Stewart, 1980).
63. Maurice Pinard, The Rise of a Third Party: A Study in Crisis Politics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971).
