Could we all get along, please?

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

The relationship between the federal government and the provinces has never been easy. At the beginning of Confederation, Nova Scotia joined the new union kicking and screaming. The tension between the English and French founders still persists, with Québec beginning to second-guess its adherence as early as the 1880s, following the hanging of Louis Riel. British Columbia, although it joined relatively early, long viewed itself as "us" versus "The Canadians." The Prairie provinces spawned almost all of this country's new political movements, on both the left and the right. And for nearly 18 of the 23 years that Oliver Mowat, pictured here, led a Liberal government in Ontario, the Conservatives held the reins of government in Ottawa, with Ontarians supporting the Conservatives federally. In fact, more often than not, people in Ontario vote differently federally than they do provincially.

As a rule, when a provincial government shares the colour of the federal government, things go better. However, if there is a divergence between these levels, it is then interesting to see if, at least, the majority of a province's federal MPs align themselves with the provincial government. But, one should be wary of generalizations.

• In the western provinces, the provincial Liberals have tended to be to the right of their federal counterparts. For example, in British Columbia, the Liberal Party, which was renamed British Columbia United in 2023, very easily filled the vacuum left by the disintegration of the Social Credit Party after 1996, the conservative party in name in that province remaining marginal since the 1950s.
   
• In the middle of the 20th century, the so-called Liberals in Saskatchewan and Manitoba were considerably to the right of the so-called Conservatives federally.
   
• Also in the West, where the political spectrum is further to the right than it is in the rest of Canada, the relationship today between the federal Liberals and the provincial New Democrats is not necessarily acrimonious.
   
• Since the 1990s, as the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties shifted the power base of today's federal Conservative Party westward, the Progressive Conservative parties that remain in Atlantic Canada more closely resemble the federal Liberals than the federal Conservatives, leaving the Liberals in those provinces in search of an identity. But in the West today, the Yukon Party, the Saskatchewan Party, and the United Conservative Party in Alberta, are the undeniable allies of the federal Conservatives, along with the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba — the only one to keep the word "progressive" in its name despite no longer being so.
   
• In Ontario, since the pronounced shift to the right of the Conservatives initiated by Mike Harris in the 1990s, the use of the word "progressive" in the name of the party is nothing more than a habit. As a result, Ontario is perhaps the only jurisdiction where the alignments between today's parties are obvious.
   
• And Quebec is Quebec! The relationship is never easy. We need only remember Robert Bourassa in 1990. The nationalist turn of this staunch Liberal following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord had nothing to do with the fact that the federal government was Conservative. With a Liberal Party in Québec sufficiently to the right to accommodate a Conservative like Jean Charest, and the rise and fall since the 1930s of parties advocating for either more autonomy or outright sovereignty for the province, there never seems to be a period during which the federal-provincial relationship is easy.

The only extended period where the provincial government in all provinces (except Alberta) was nominally the same as the federal goverment was when Mackenzie King was Canada's prime minister. Indeed, from late-1939 to mid-1943, every government was Liberal "red," except Alberta's, which was Social Credit green.

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The first column of the scrollable table below shows who formed the government federally over the years. Then, for each province and territory, you can see the majority of MPs in that province (in the F column), and the gov­ern­ment formed provincially (in the P column) over those same years. In the F columns, in cases where two parties arrived in first place in terms of seats, the colour of the party with the most votes is ascribed to the period.

You can reduce the number of provinces and years to display at once.

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