Plus ça change: Cycles of history and the 2004 federal election

Inroads, Winter 2005 by Schachter, Harvey

DURING THE LAST FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN, THERE WAS A moment when a Conservative minority government looked likely, with wide speculation that it might be propped up by the Bloc Québécois. On the Inroads listserv, that led to an illuminating discussion on the challenges federal political parties face in dealing with Quebec's political parties and voters - still very topical, and perhaps even more topical should Liberal support further wane.

From: Reg Whitaker

There has been much discussion the past few days about the Conservatives and the Bloc. I would like to sketch in some historical context for this bizarre odd coupling.

In their fine book Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics, Ken Carty, Bill Cross and Lisa Young lay out a historical succession of four distinct national party systems:

1st: 1867-1921

2nd: 1921-1962

3rd: 1962-1993

4th: 1993-present

Each of these systems has particular features we need not go into here. What is very interesting, however, is that the end of each of these systems has been signalled by an apparent triumph of the Conservatives followed by a Tory collapse so severe that it shakes up the system and forces the emergence of a new party alignment under Liberal dominance.

The end of the first, strictly two-party, system was preceded by the Union government of 1917 which split the Liberals into pro- and anti-conscriptionist wings with the former joining the Borden government. In the subsequent election, the Conservatives finished third, displaced by the new Progressive Party. This marked the emergence of a new system with third parties that persisted until the 1960s, most of it spent under the King and Saint-Laurent Liberals.

The end of the second party system was preceded by the Diefenbaker Tory landslide of 1958, followed by Dief's self-destruction in 1962-63 and a third national party system under the Pearson and Trudeau Liberals. The end of this phase was in turn preceded by the apparent triumph of the Mulroney Tories with two successive majority governments in 1984 and 1988, followed by their near-total demise in 1993 and yet another party system with four fragmented opposition parties and dominant Liberal rule under Chrétien.

The historical pattern is striking: the Conservatives have spectacularly failed at the very moment of their apparent triumph, and the Liberals have returned to office, usually for lengthy periods of time. In fact, since Laurier became Prime Minister in 1896, Liberals have been in power three quarters of the time. Which leads to the question: why is it that for the Conservative Party nothing apparently fails like success, and for the Liberals nothing succeeds like failure?

There are undoubtedly a number of factors that explain this paradox, which I would be happy to expound at length and no doubt will in future, probably at book length. But for now, let me isolate one crucial difference: how the two national parties relate to Quebec.

The Borden Conservatives drove the Laurier Liberals out of office in 1911 by relying on the Nationalists under Henri Bourassa to slice off enough of Laurier's Quebec support. But after imposing conscription on an unwilling Quebec, they had shot themselves in both feet in that province for four decades, leaving it monolithically to the King-Saint-Laurent Liberals.

The Diefenbaker Tories in 1958 formed an alliance with the provincial Union Nationale of Maurice Duplessis and took 50 of 75 Quebec seats. They lost almost all of them in the next election, given Diefs incomprehension of the new Quebec in the Quiet Revolution.

Mulroney in 1984 formed a coalition of western conservatives and Quebec nationalists, the latter symbolized by his Quebec lieutenant, closet sovereigntist Lucien Bouchard, and what the sovereigntists called the "beau risque" of the Meech Lake Accord in the late 1980s. That accord and the coalition blew apart so spectacularly that they fragmented the PC party into two new parties, the Bloc under Bouchard and Reform in the west.

The moral of all this is, I believe, quite simple, but very unpleasant for the Conservatives: the Tories have failed consistently in Quebec because they have tried to build a base by appeasing nationalists/sovereigntists. That has not provided a stable or reliable base for the Conservatives in Quebec, and they have also eventually destabilized their support in the rest of Canada, especially in the West and Ontario, traditionally most suspicious of favouritism for Quebec. The Liberals on the other hand have not hunted for nationalist/sovereigntist votes but always stuck to appealing to Quebec federalists, who have been the only stable base in the long run for a federalist, national party.

I submit that we may be seeing yet another rerun of this recurrent pattern. The dominant Liberals falter, as any party that stays too long in power is bound to do: the newly (nearly) reunited Conservatives emerge as a viable contender but lack any base in Quebec; they end up trying to deal with the sovereigntist devil, this time at a distance via an interparty arrangement following the possible election of a Conservative minority government. This may not be as bad as bringing the likes of Lucien Bouchard into the government as Quebec lieutenant, but it is just as unstable and volatile, and ultimately as politically unwise a move on their part. If the pattern holds up, we might look for a relatively early demise of the experiment, a renewed burst of sovereigntist enthusiasm in Quebec, a fierce disillusionment with the Conservatives in the rest of Canada, and then the resurrection of the Liberals - perhaps not under Martin, just as Chrétien took over from Turner after his defeats in 1984 and 1988 - to another era of dominance.