The Liberal Party, which has dominated federal politics throughout the 20th century as the "government party," first developed its formula for political success under the leadership of Sir Wilfrid LAURIER, who was prime minister from 1896 to 1911. In clear contrast to its enjoyment of power through the politics of pragmatism in this century, the party's 19th-century history is a record of long decades of opposition to the powerful through the pursuit of reform principles.
Opposition politics took organizational shape in the colonies of British North America with the establishment of representative institutions in Nova Scotia (1758), New Brunswick (1784) and Upper and Lower Canada (1791). Since power in these colonies was concentrated in a governing oligarchy of appointed governors and councils that was not held responsible to the elected assemblies, reformers appealed to the Whig principle of parliamentary supremacy in pressing for the adoption of RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT. In the Maritimes Joseph HOWE led a 10-year struggle for responsible government that was finally successful in 1848. In the same year, a Reform coalition led by Robert BALDWIN in Canada West and Louis-Hippolyte LAFONTAINE in Canada East achieved the same breakthrough.
In Canada West, the radical farmers of southwest Ontario, known as the Clear Grits, who had been inspired by the anti-British radicalism of William Lyon MACKENZIE, strongly attacked the CLERGY RESERVES as an institutionalization of the FAMILY COMPACT's domination and a denial of liberty to the Protestant denominations. With the vocal support of the Reform publisher, George BROWN, whose newspaper, The Globe, was the most influential organ in the colony, the Reformers succeeded in eliminating the reserves by the 1850s. Co-operation between the anti-Family-Compact Reformers in Upper Canada and the anti-English-oligarchy Rougesin Lower Canada broke down in the 1850s over the question of state support for denominational schools. The liberalism of Protestant Reformers led them to believe that each church should be supported by the aid of its adherents, voluntarily offered. By extension, denominational schools should not receive public funds.
Pre-Confederation Reform politicians believed in the principles of English liberalism. Opposition to government intervention in the economy in the form of tariff protection, which conservative administrations tended to favour, led mid-century Reformers to advocate free trade with their admired neighbour to the south. The crowning achievement of the Reform administration of Francis HINCKS and A.N. MORIN was the negotiation of a RECIPROCITY treaty with the US in 1854. This proclivity for CONTINENTALISM was to remain a theme of Liberal politics for the next century.
In the early years of Confederation, the Liberals, as the Reform remnants now called themselves, could do little against the political wiles of the Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. MACDONALD and the breadth of his coalition in federal politics. The post-Confederation Liberals developed successful provincial organizations. As premier of Ontario from 1872 to 1896, Sir Oliver MOWAT led the provinces' assault on the power of the Dominion government in the name of provincial rights, a tenet of Liberal thought for several decades.
Following the downfall of Macdonald's government over the PACIFIC SCANDAL, the dour stonemason Alexander MACKENZIE formed the federation's first Liberal administration in 1873, but a severe economic depression and Mackenzie's lack of political vision led to Macdonald's re-election in 1878 on a platform of protection. The resulting NATIONAL POLICY of tariff protection was vigorously opposed by Edward BLAKE, a Toronto lawyer and ex-premier of Ontario, who led the Liberal Party from 1880 to 1887. (Blake is the only federal Liberal leader never to have become prime minister.) Blake and Mowat pressed for further reforms of the ELECTORAL SYSTEM and managed to wean their Ontario supporters from the fanatical anti-Catholicism they had retained from the Clear Grits and George Brown.
Meanwhile, in Québec, Wilfrid Laurier was turning the Rouges- the radical successors of Papineau's PATRIOTES from the 1837 uprising - from anticlericalism by preaching the principles of William Gladstone's English liberalism and the virtues of racial conciliation. Chosen party leader by the reluctant federal caucus upon Blake's advice in 1887, Laurier gradually broadened the Liberals' base in Québec and, on a platform of provincial rights, won the election of 1896 despite the hostility of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the embarrassment of Manitoba's discrimination against French-speaking Catholics.
Laurier went on to win the next 3 elections by copying Macdonald's formula for success - a nationwide coalition of forces, an expansionary role for government, and an accommodation between the French and the English - tempering the principles of Liberal reform with pragmatism and PATRONAGE. He built his electoral coalition in English Canada on the organizational backs of Liberal provincial premiers whom he brought into his Cabinet as power brokers for their regions. He endorsed the aggressive IMMIGRATION POLICY to settle the West of his Manitoba minister, Clifford SIFTON, and he entered the same kind of transcontinental railway-building collaboration with the Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern that his caucus had denounced in the 1880s when championed by Macdonald.
Nevertheless, differences of principle still distinguished the Laurier Liberals from their Conservative opponents. In foreign policy, the Liberals showed their affinity to Gladstone's anti-imperialism by their preference for an independent Canadian Navy over Canadian contributions to the British navy. In commercial policy Laurier achieved the long-held Liberal goal of a reciprocity agreement with the US. It was a victory that proved his undoing: reciprocity alienated the protection-minded business community whose support he had cultivated, and the Liberals went down to defeat in the 1911 election in the face of the Conservative Party's anti-Americanism. Laurier soldiered on as leader, watching in despair as the WWI military CONSCRIPTION issue nearly destroyed his party by temporarily shaking the solidarity of its English-French alliance.
The Liberals' next, and probably greatest, leader was William Lyon Mackenzie KING, who began his career as a public servant and ended it as the most enduring prime minister in Canadian history (1921-48 except for 2 periods in opposition, in 1926 and 1930-35). King's political longevity has been ascribed to his uncanny capacity for blurring political issues to maintain support among such ideologically opposed groups as western free-trade farmers and protectionist manufacturers in central Canada; his shrewd recognition of the importance of sustaining Québec support, especially during WWII; his talent for attracting to his Cabinet strong ministers with regional power bases and making the best use of their abilities and connections; and his success in presenting a progressive face to the electorate by gradually initiating social-welfare programs while propitiating the business community. King straddled the middle of the political road while leaning slightly left; his genius for obfuscation was epitomized by his vacuous 1935 campaign slogan "King or Chaos" and his Delphic position, "conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription," with which he walked the tightrope between English-Canadian militants and Québec pacifists during WWII.
King's hand-picked successor, Louis ST. LAURENT, was more admired among the bureaucratic and business elites than was King, but because of his disregard of party organization and his dependence on the Ottawa bureaucracy, his regime witnessed the collapse of King's great Liberal alliance and the beginning of the party's persistent alienation from western Canada. Since St. Laurent's narrow defeat by John DIEFENBAKER (1957), the Liberal Party has been struggling to regain its status as a truly national party.
It took Lester Bowles PEARSON, a Nobel-peace-prize-winning former diplomat and secretary of state for external affairs who was elected party leader in early 1958, 3 elections before he won back power in 1963. It was largely thanks to the organizational skills and reformist convictions of his close adviser, Walter GORDON, that this most unpolitical of Liberal leaders managed to establish his control over the rebuilt party organization. One price of Gordon's reforms was the further alienation of the western provincial organizations from what had become a Toronto-dominated party. Gordon received the credit for winning a minority victory in 1963 and then was blamed for recommending another election in 1965, which returned the Liberals as a MINORITY GOVERNMENT once more. Even when the extraordinary Pierre Elliott TRUDEAU succeeded Pearson in a hotly contested leadership campaign in 1968, the party continued to scramble unsuccessfully to remake its alliance with the West, managing to remain in office until 1979 and then again from 1980 to 1984 despite marked vacillations in its popularity on the basis of its strength in central Canada.
Party Size
Liberal Party officials in the 1990s claimed some 250 000 adherents. Though membership balloons during leadership and election campaigns, it falls off sharply in the intervening years when the rank-and-file have little function. Although structured under its elaborate constitution as a mass democratic party whose leadership, in theory, is controlled by the grass-roots membership, it is in fact run along oligarchic lines. Real power is held by the party leader and his coterie. The party's top-down structure is modified slightly in periods of opposition when its leadership is forced to appeal for greater rank-and-file participation in policymaking as an inducement to mobilize the grass roots in a collective struggle to regain power. The number of people belonging to the 282 federal constituency associations in the 1980s cannot easily be compared with its membership in the past, because historically the party was a federation of provincial parties whose membership varied greatly, depending on who was in power in individual provinces. In the early 1980s the Liberals were without a single member in the 4 provincial legislatures west of Ontario, a situation that reflected their federal weakness in the West, where they had fallen to third-party stature.
Splinter Groups
As in any such broadly based party, there are always small but significant groups that oppose the dominant view of the Liberal leadership. In BC in the 1950s many provincial Liberals formed an electoral coalition with the right-wing Social Credit movement, to the dismay of the federal party. In the 1960s, Ross THATCHER, the Liberal premier of Saskatchewan, strongly opposed the welfare liberalism of Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Both conflicts helped destroy the federal party's credibility in the West. Throughout the party's history there has been tension between the forces of continentalism and NATIONALISM within Liberal ranks; it became most obvious during the 1960s when Walter Gordon led the effort to limit the growth of foreign control in the economy. Gordon lost his preliminary battles but did not abandon the war, unlike other dissidents, such as James RICHARDSON and Eric KIERANS, Cabinet ministers who quit the Trudeau government when their policy positions were rejected.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were again left-right tensions in the party, chiefly between Pierre Trudeau and John TURNER and their respective followers. Though Turner, Trudeau's former minister of finance, quit the Cabinet in 1975, he played the role of Liberal dauphin-in-exile for almost a decade. Two weeks after Trudeau announced he would retire, Turner declared his candidacy for the succession, a goal he achieved on 16 June 1984 at the party's leadership convention. Sworn in as prime minister on June 30, he quickly called a general election, hoping to profit from the Liberals' brief surge of popularity in the public opinion polls. Without an adequate organization, platform or personal campaign style, he led the party to the worst electoral defeat in its history. The results were Progressive Conservatives 211, Liberals 40, New Democrats 30 and Independent 1.
Electoral Appeal and Popular Support
Since the 1930s the Liberals' electoral appeal has been based on projecting an image of competence and compromise. Ideologically the party has clung to the political centre, modulating its stance in each region and appealing to the upwardly mobile middle class of urban central Canada. In the Atlantic provinces, where the social democrats have traditionally had great difficulty in becoming a third political force, Liberals vie directly with Conservatives in a 2-party seesaw fight for votes. From 1896 to 1980, strong plurality of the Québec vote generally translated into an overwhelming majority of the province's seats. But the Liberals' identification with Pierre Trudeau's highly unpopular constitutional reform of 1982 has reduced them to 33% of the votes and 21% of the seats in the subsequent elections. In Ontario, electoral support averaging 40% translated into 60% of the seats since the 1930s. Exceptionally in 1993 electoral support of 53% yielded 98 of the province's 99 seats thanks to the NDP's collapse and Reform splitting the conservative vote. For decades third-party status in the western provinces and northern territories turned electoral returns of about 30% of the votes into a tiny number of actual Liberal seats. Here, too, the 1993 election marked a breakthrough: overall one-third of the vote produced one-third of the seats and MPs for the Liberal caucus from each province.
Financial Support
The Liberals traditionally raised election campaign money from big businessmen and, to a lesser extent, small entrepreneurs. Since the introduction of the ELECTION EXPENSES ACT (1974), reliance on business funding has dramatically declined in favour of tax-deductible member donations and direct subsidies from the public purse.
Current Issues and Significant Changes in the Party
The most significant changes in recent decades in the Liberal Party were heralded by the accession to the party's leadership of Pierre Trudeau in 1968 and his resignation 16 years later. Under his aegis French Canadians achieved greater equity within the Liberal Party and the Government of Canada than ever before. Trudeau's dedication to FEDERALISM and to combatting the separatist forces of Québec nationalism lay at the heart both of his early electrifying appeal to the public and of the strong animosities he later generated among English-Canadian voters. His controversial personal style and the vacillations of his policies (eg, withdrawing Canadian troops from, then reinforcing, NATO; opposing economic nationalism, then endorsing the adoption of a dramatic National Energy Program) kept his personality the chief issue of the political scene, notwithstanding his significant achievement in generating a wide consensus outside Québec for the "patriation" of the CONSTITUTION in 1982. As Trudeau's period in office ended and his successor was plagued by dramatic problems of ideological direction and party organization, some speculated, as they had in 1957 and again in 1979 when the party fell temporarily from power, that the Liberals were on the edge of disappearing from the country's political map.
Turner brought the party back to respectability in 1988, with a strong campaign that appealed to nationalism amid the anxiety generated by the Conservatives' plan to sign a free-trade agreement with the US. The party won 82 seats. When Jean Chrétien became leader in 1990, he inherited a party that was disorganized and almost bankrupt. His support of the Conservatives' CHARLOTTETOWN CONSTITUTIONAL ACCORD cost his party support in Québec, but concentrating on developing policies and on organization, the Liberals were well prepared for the election of October 1993. The Liberals emphasized job creation and released a detailed platform book that effectively answered criticisms that the party would return to the spending extravagances of previous Liberal governments. The campaign was a triumph, as the Liberals won a clear majority of 177 seats. With the annihilation of the Conservative Party (which fell from 154 seats to 2) and the virtual collapse of the NDP (which retained 9 of 43 seats), Chrétien's Liberal Party was the sole national party boasting representation in the House of Commons from every province.
With neither the PCs nor the NDP enjoying official party status in the House of Commons and with Reform unable to make a breakthrough in central and eastern Canada, it looked as though the Liberal Party would end the 20th century as it had ended the 19th: in triumph, but for Québec, which held its leader in contempt and which came within a breath of voting for sovereignty. Retention by the Bloc Québécois of its Official Opposition status is not just a cause for deep embarrassment for the Liberals; it could also represent their Waterloo. Should Québec vote for separation the history of the Liberal Party as builder of the English-French entente in Canada will have ended. If Québec does not separate, Jean Chrétien's government will probably be best remembered for having dismantled those nation-building institutions that his Liberal predecessors had constructed in the name of justice and equality.
AUTHOR: CHRISTINA MCCALL AND STEPHEN CLARKSON READING: Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times Vol 1, The Magnificent Obsession (1990), and Vol 2, The Heroic Delusion (1994); Christina McCall-Newman, Grits(1982); J. Wearing, The L-Shaped Party (1980); R. Whitaker, The Government Party (1977).
