Political process and popular protest: the mobilization against free trade in Canada

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 1996  by Jeffrey M. Ayres

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VIII

conclusion

Despite its many evident successes, the outcome of the 1988 federal election marked the beginning of the end of the mobilization and protest campaign of the anti-free trade movement. The Progressive Conservative party received 169 of the 295 available Parliamentary seats, the Liberal party eighty-three and the NDP forty-three. However, the Tories gained this considerably large margin of victory in seats by virtue of Canada's single-member district, first-past-the-post electoral system. This system had generously translated the Tories' forty-three percent of the vote into 169 seats, the Liberal's thirty-two percent share secured only eighty-three, and the NDP's twenty percent provided forty-three seats. Thus, in fact, over fifty-two percent of the voting public had supported the two parties opposed to the free trade agreement.

In light of the discrepancy between popular vote and seats received, there was a considerable degree of outcry from the anti-free trade community that suggested the Tories in fact lacked the mandate to implement the free trade agreement.(37) The results from the scholarly community, however, were mixed. A number of studies suggested that while the free trade issue dominated the 1988 election (in pre-election surveys, it was mentioned as the most important issue by eighty-two percent of the electorate(38)) whether the fifty-two percent of the popular vote garnered by the opposition parties was in fact a majority anti-free trade vote was in some considerable doubt.(39)

These unresolved debates aside, one analytically revealing aspect of the electoral outcome, as far as its impact on the fate of the anti-free trade movement was concerned, lay in the division of the popular opposition vote between the Liberal and New Democratic parties. This outcome signalled a dramatic closure of political opportunity for the movement. That is, where divisions between political elites had provided critical movement-sustaining political opportunity structures throughout the life-span of the movement's emergence and mobilization, a devastating division between the key political party allies of the movement marked the decline of the movement on election day. The election aftermath witnessed an organizationally fractured movement facing a considerably circumscribed post-election political opportunity structure - another Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney, in turn followed by a pro-free trade and pro-NAFTA Liberal government under the leadership of Jean Chretien.

Nevertheless, the activities of the anti-free trade movement fit central tenets of the PPM. Dozens of anti-free trade groups, representing over ten million Canadians, collectively launched an organized, strategic campaign of protest against the FTA. Through the direction of the PCN these groups pooled their popular sector resources, awakening a skeptical Canadian public to their concerns, and sensitizing political parties to the strategic value of an anti-FTA stand. At the same time, a set of supportive political opportunity structures complemented the PCN's campaign, facilitating the movement's influential intervention in the public and political debate over the FTA. Missing prior to the movement's emergence were such political opportunities for collective action: groups remained excluded from the polity, the political system remained stable, and the bargaining position of those excluded groups remained insignificant. The difference in the outcome of this movement, then, was found in the political realm.