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Political parties in Canada: The evolution of families

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

Political parties were not recognized in the British Columbia legislature until 1903. They weren’t either in Manitoba until 1879 (or 1888), nor in New Brunswick until 1935. However, the concept of political parties was very different back then compared to how we think of it today.

Up until the early 20th century, parties could best be described as banners. They were not as regulated as they have become since the middle of the 20th century. In fact, prior to an election, candidates would simply declare them­selves as “Liberal,” “Conservative” etc. Few were selected by the parties, although a party could at times choose not to endorse some candidates, forcing them to run as “Independent [name of the party].” What’s more, in many juris­dic­tions until the 1970s, ballots listed candidates with their profession rather than their political affiliation.

But in addition to that, some parties have slided over time on the traditional left-right continuum — in some cases, flipping entirely. Today, we might assume that the several “Progressive” parties that emerged after the First World War were on the left; however, many of their adherents had come from the Conservatives. And as the electoral fortune of those parties waned by the end of the 1920s, some of those who were elected as Progressives joined either the Liberals or the Conservatives, while others went on to form the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF.

• At the federal level, many Progressives had joined the Liberals by the 1930 general election, but back then, the Liberals were a “small-c” conservative party, much further to the right than where Mark Carney has taken that party in 2025.
   
• In Saskatchewan, the elected Progressives joined the Conservatives in 1929 to form government, and disappeared after that.
   
• However, in Alberta, that province’s variant (namely the United Farmers of Alberta) is today considered the predecessor of the CCF, which became the NDP in the early 1960s.
   
• Similarly, in British Columbia, the Socialist Party from 1903 became the Independent Labour Party in 1928, then the CCF in 1933 and the NDP by the 1960s. But while, by 2001, the Liberal Party filled the void left by the death of the Social Credit Party in 1996, the two parties are still considered as belonging to distinct families, especially since the Liberals in British Columbia then went on to lean equally towards the federal Liberals and Conservatives, whereas the Social Credit would only lean towards the Conservatives.
   
• But in Manitoba, unlike in Ottawa, it was the Progressives who absorbed the provincial Liberal Party to become the “small-c” conservative Liberal-Progressive Party in the early 1930s, dropping the “Progressive” part of its name in the early 1960s. The Liberal-Progressives were in fact so conservative that, in 1942, when the federal Conservative Party was desperate to find a leader to bring it back to power, it turned to John Bracken, who accepted as long as the party agreed to be renamed “Progressive Conservative.”
   
• And in pre-Confederation Newfoundland, the parties’ names were meaningless as the Liberals absorbed the Conservatives and then later the resurgent Conservatives absorbed the Liberals. For instance, in his first mandate as premier from 1878 to 1885, William Whiteway was a Conservative; in his second and third mandates from 1889 to 1897, he was a Liberal. Meanwhile, the Newfoundland People’s Party was considered as “left” when it emerged in 1908, just as the Conservative Party had disappeared and the Liberal Party had become the con­ser­va­tive party. But by the 1923 election, the NPP had morphed into the conservative Liberal-Labour-Progressive Party representing mostly the interests of the St. John’s business class, and the Liberals positioned themselves to the left of the LLP Party as the Liberal Reform Party.

And just in case you’re not sufficiently confused, don’t forget that the Conservatives were officially the “Liberal Conservatives” in many jurisdictions until the 1930s, while the Liberals were, well... They’ve pretty much always been the Liberals! Except, of course, in Manitoba (see above), or in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, where they became BC United and Saskatchewan Progress in the 2023. But Saskatchewan is even more peculiar because, if we were to anthropomorphize, the Saskatchewan Party, which has been governing since 2007, could best be described as a new blended family of former Liberals and PCs, the alliance between them being more plausible when one considers that the Liberals in that province had not been as centrist as their federal counterpart, despite keeping a formal link with the latter until 2009.

That being said, the throughline for most parties is clear. The CFF did become the NDP in 1961, calling itself the New Party in some federal by-elections while it was still choosing its name. But it would be incorrect to think of the 1879 Liberal Party of Manitoba as today’s Manitoba Liberal Party, for the latter is a spinoff of the Progressive Party. Similarly, no one could credibly refer to today’s federal Conservative Party as the party of John A. Macdonald or John Diefenbaker, for in reality, it was the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance, itself the descendant of the Reform Party, that in 2003 absorbed Dief’s by-then-agonizing Progressive Conservative Party. Similarly, the United Conservative Party in Alberta is a spinoff of the Wildrose Party, not the Progressive Conservative Party. In New Brunswick, however, the People’s Alliance had just enough influence in its short existence to pull the PCs to the right.

So, to make some sense of this confusion, especially in this section, PoliCan makes reference to political families rather than political parties.
 

Different bottle, same wine, or same bottle, different wine

In almost all jurisdictions in Canada, a woman may still choose to take the name of her spouse once married. Other people, for reasons known (like Adam Fergusson Blair) or unknown (like Hubert Benoit-Décary), simply choose to change their name. But no one would dispute that the person did not change otherwise. Just like painting the exterior of a house yellow rather than red does not fundamentally change the house.

However, politically, a person can evolve. In his youth, Gilles Duceppe was a card-carrying communist. He later claimed that his time in that party was a mistake, brought on by a search for absolute answers. But one thing is certain: he probably has absolutely nothing in common today with Pierre Poilievre or Danielle Smith! For his part, David MacDonald was a minister in the short-lived Clark ministry, but in 1997, while he was in a domestic partnership with Alexa McDonough, he ran for the NDP.

In the same way, political parties can shift. One can think of the federal Liberal Party under Jean Chrétien versus Paul Martin, or under Justin Trudeau versus Mark Carney. While some shifts were more than cosmetic, that party has been occupying a relatively centrist position since the 1960s. But with the benefit of hindsight, although it seemed considerable at the time, the gap between the Liberals and the “Conservatives” wasn’t that wide until the 1990s. So, by going beyond the relatively normal shifts within parties and grasping the notion of political families, we can better understand the political cleavage that exists today.

Some might argue that Carney would have been comfortable in Clark’s or even Mulroney’s family. But that could be because that’s not at all who he’s facing. He’s in fact facing a libertarian and belligerent Manning family, without its former Social Credit monetary policies.