Conservatives and Liberals, the Blues and the Reds, have been political combatants in this country from the very beginning. They’ve contested every election ever sense, with the Liberals taking enough of those contests to be regarded at one time as Canada’s “Natural Governing Party.”
When you butt heads that often, over that many years, it’s completely understandable that a natural enmity would emerge between the two, something that leaks right down to the roots, right down into generations of families identifying themselves as being one or the other. And if they go red, then they hate blue, and if blue, then red.
It’s one of the reasons why political discussions at dinner parties are a 50-50 proposition.
One of the reasons the Conservatives historically carried the shorter stick was due to the reality that there are several distinct constituencies that have to come together to form the Conservative brand. It’s a big tent, but often an angry tent, made up of pockets of discontent and grievance, none of those pockets necessarily in synch with one another, but united only by their hatred of the Liberals.
The Great Mulroney Coalition that won two back-to-back Conservative majority governments in the 1980’s was one such broad coalition, but the two largest constituencies were Quebec nationalists and the never-stalling busload of Albertan, and after that Western Canada malcontents. It’s an uneasy alliance, but it worked to the extent that the Tories were Canada’s governing party of the 1980’s.
But then the alliance came apart, smashed upon the rocks of its internal divisions, the coalition being an unnatural amalgamation of competing interests, often at cross-purposes with one another.
Preston Manning and his western-based Reform Party won 52 seats in the 1993 federal election, while Lucien Bouchard and his newly-minted Bloc Québécois won 54 of their own. The Conservatives, that is the Progressive Conservatives as they were then known, won only two seats. The Liberals took 177 to form a majority government under Jean Chrétien. And thus began a four-term run of Liberal rule, with much of that owing to the fact that the conservative vote in Canada was split three ways, between the Bloc, Reform, and what remained of the PCs.
After an internal civil war, and no small measure of backroom back-stabbing, the western elements of the former coalition came together with the PCs to form, first the Canadian Alliance Party, and then after PC leader Peter McKay’s betrayal, the Conservative Party of Canada, booting the progressive prefix to the landfill. As to the Quebec nationalists in the Bloc Québécois, to hell with them. No longer would western alienists have to suffer Québec nationalists in the same room. The only good thing about those Bloc Québécois folks is that they siphoned off a lot of support from the Liberals in Quebec, where after the Mulroney years, Conservatives dare not tread. It seems the people of Quebec are still a little miffed about the whole Louis Riel thing, even after all these years. Dogs in Quebec still howl well into the night over Riel’s hanging.
So with the Liberals bleeding in Quebec, and the “conservatives” coming together as mostly a solid block of western alienation, the stage was set for Battleground Ontario, where the presence of over 124 seats was the key to success at the federal level.
Neither the sweet song of western alienation nor the catchy tune of Quebec nationalism is particularly attractive to the people of Ontario, the same people who hold this Confederation together time after time, year after year. Ontarians don’t get a choice when out comes to supporting or not supporting the Bloc Québécois, but they do have the ability to elect Conservatives if they choose, which they seem traditionally reluctant to do at the federal level, possibly owing to that anachronistic tendency to support one party in Toronto and the opposite party in Ottawa, a bet-hedging piece of electoral balancing that’s been going on for decades. So while the Liberals hold sway federally, you’re usually going to see the Tories in charge provincially.
But Ontario’s Conservatives are Progressive Conservatives, meaning they believe in paying the bills at the same time as looking out for their citizens. They’re not as ideologically-driven as their federal counterparts, and these days the two don’t even talk. Ontario, it seems, doesn’t like it when shrill, loud voices and boorish behaviour are being offered to them as a choice. Rural places perhaps more so, but generally speaking, the Preston Mannings, Pierre Poilievres, and Danielle Smiths aren’t celebrated here. People who threaten national unity tend not to get much of an audience in broader Ontario.
The NDP throws a cog into all of this, to the delight of the Conservatives, since the New Democrats are the favourite party of the Conservatives, other than, of course, themselves. Which is weird, because the NDP and the Conservatives don’t live in the same neighbourhood on the political spectrum, the Conservatives being decidedly right while the NDP leans left. But like the Bloc Québécois, the New Democrats take votes away from Liberals, with Conservatives often sliding up the middle for riding victories that they likely wouldn’t achieve in a one-on-one race with the Grits.
So, when the NDP does well, it helps the Conservatives, and when they do poorly, it tends to help the Liberals.
Going back to the start, I said that the Liberals and the Conservatives don’t like each other, and I could even go one better and say that for a lot of people, they hate one another. But interestingly enough, as much as this antipathy of the Liberals toward the Tories, and vice versa exists, there’s another dynamic in play, a serious one.
You see, the Liberals and the NDP can’t stand one another either.
For the Liberals, it has to do with the nuisance New Democrats eating into their vote, compromising their efforts to defeat Conservatives. And for the NDP, it has to do with being the poor cousins on the left, or centre-left, who often prop up Liberal governments in minority situations in order to keep the Conservatives out, only to be clobbered in any subsequent election after the Liberals “steal” all their progressive policy ideas.
The Liberal-NDP divide is about as close to an intra-family fight as there is in Canadian politics, and we all know that fights within a family tend to be the worst, probably because there’s always this feeling of betrayal involved. You’d think it would be different given how the two parties occupy similar spots along the political spectrum, but that’s the point right there. Because the two parties have a bit of a Venn diagram going when it comes to potential supporters, they tend to fish in the same hole for the same voters. That can lead to a bitterness that trumps anything the Tories and Grits have going on between them.
So now, with the passage of time, it’s the Conservative who are potentially poised to be the Party of Perpetuity, if they could ever get their act together, stop shouting and complaining, and get a leader who doesn’t spit nails and razor blades. As I said, when the Liberals and NDP at each other’s throats, the Conservatives can only gain. Which could very well lead to a situation where it’s the Conservatives, and not the Liberals, who become the Natural Governing Party.
That said, it’s entirely possible for the federal Conservatives to collapse under the weight of their own divisions. There’s one thing to be a right-winger, but another thing altogether to be a far right-winger. We can already see the emergence of splinter parties like the PPC and the UPC (Peoples’ Party of Canada and United Party of Canada) being hived off the Conservative carcass, and the Conservatives themselves have deposed the last two leaders they had immediately after their election losses. Andrew Scheer will never be missed because he’s another Polievre, just with a better smile, but Erin O’Toole is a good man who got chased out because he wasn’t angry enough. And they passed on other progressives like Jean Charest and Patrick Brown, because, well they were too reasonable, too conciliatory, more inclined to be Canadians first and Conservatives second.
Also, take a look at what happened in Alberta with former Premier Jason Kenney, chased out of the party leadership by the pitchfork and torch crowd, because he wasn’t right-wing enough. Anybody who knows Jason Kenney will be able to tell you that it’s pretty tough to find any room to the right of him, but in Alberta, they’ll always find a way. Bitterly howling at the moon is the provincial song. They also seem to have a penchant for radio personalities as premiers, something that goes back to the days of bible-thumping Premier William Eberhart who was the political evangelist that managed to tap God into supporting his party and policies. God and Wild Bill together could set Alberta straight and fend off those bastards from Eastern Canada.
And they do all this without hallucinogenic drugs.
God and I hang out, we have for a long time, although he never texts back, which is annoying because you’d think that God would have the best of phones. But so far as I can remember, he’s never shared with me his deep love for Alberta Conservatives. In fact, he’s never mentioned them.
Until the Conservatives return to the days of internal back-stabbing and shooting themselves in the foot, they are, right now, a threat to form government in any election where the Liberals and the NDP are at each other’s throats.
And that’s why it might be time, once again, for the Liberals and the NDP to bury their hatchets, not in the backs of each other, but in an effort to make a political peace borne out of necessity. Because if those two centre-left parties ever came together as one, to basically merge, then they’d no longer have to fight two-front wars against each other and the Tories simultaneously.
At this point in time, this point in history, the centre-left vote out-weighs the centre-right, and it certainly overwhelms the far right, where the political whackos call home. Such a merger would virtually guarantee Liberal wins at the federal level until the time comes when the Tories realize that elections are won in the centre of the spectrum, and not at the bottom of some Alberta septic tank or ridings like Algonquin-Renfrew-Pembroke, an Alberta riding trapped inside an Ontario body.
I truly wish none of this was necessary, and perhaps it won’t be. It would be absolutely healthy for everyone if the Conservatives could offer a reasonable alternative to the Liberals, but they’re going to struggle to do so as long as they truck in anger and grievance politics. But the Catch-22 of it is the fact that western alienists are the core of the party now. Without them you’re left with a rump, and more Liberal wins. And so, by any reasonable political calculus, that’s not likely to happen, at least by choice.
I have to say this:
I could live with more Conservative seats in Ontario if there were to be more Liberal seats in Alberta. That would be healthy for all of us.
We already elect Tories here, so we do our part. If the people of Alberta were to ever grow up, we might just have a solid country here, notwithstanding those nationalists in Quebec.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 