Progressive Conservative Party of Canada - History

History

Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, originally belonged to the Conservative Party. But in advance of confederation in 1867, the Conservative Party took in a large number of members who defected from the Liberal Party who supported the establishment of a Canadian Confederation.

Thereafter, the Conservative Party became the "Liberal-Conservative" (in French, "Libéral-Conservateur") Party until the turn of the twentieth century.

The federal Tories governed Canada for over forty of the country's first seventy years of existence. However, the party spent the majority of its history in opposition as the nation's number-two federal party, behind the Liberals. From 1896 to 1993 the Tories only formed a government five times—from 1911 to 1921, from 1930 to 1935, from 1957 to 1963, from 1979 to 1980 and from 1984 to 1993. The party did, however, have the distinction of being the only Canadian party to win more than 200 seats in an election—a feat it accomplished twice, in 1958 and 1984.

The party suffered a decade-long decline following the 1993 federal election, and formally dissolved on December 7, 2003, when it merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the new Conservative Party. The Progressive Conservative caucus last officially met in early 2004.

Between the party's founding in 1867, and its adoption of the "Progressive Conservative" name in 1942, the party changed its name several times. It was most commonly known as the Conservative Party.

Several loosely-associated provincial Progressive Conservative parties continue to exist in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. As well, a small rump of Senators opposed to the merger continue to sit in Parliament as Progressive Conservatives. The Yukon association of the party renamed itself as the Yukon Party in 1990. The British Columbia Progressive Conservative Party changed its name back to the British Columbia Conservative Party in 1991. Saskatchewan's Progressive Conservative Party effectively ceased to exist in 1997, when the Saskatchewan Party formed - primarily from former PC Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) with a few Liberal Party MLAs joining them.

The party adopted the "Progressive Conservative" party name in 1942 when Manitoba Premier John Bracken, a long-time leader of that province's Progressive Party, agreed to become leader of the Conservatives on condition that the party add Progressive to its name. Despite the name change, most former Progressive supporters continued to support the Liberal Party or the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and Bracken's leadership of the Conservative Party came to an end in 1948. Many Canadians simply continued to refer to the party as "the Conservatives".

A major weakness of the party since 1885 was its inability to win support in Quebec, estranged significantly by that year's execution of Louis Riel. The Conscription Crisis of 1917 exacerbated the issue. Even though the Quebec Conservative Party dominated politics in that province for the first thirty years of Confederation at both the federal and provincial levels, in the 20th century the party was never able to become a force in provincial politics, losing power in 1897, and ultimately dissolving in 1935 into the Union Nationale, which took power in 1936 under Maurice Duplessis.

In 20th-century federal politics, the Conservatives were often seen as insensitive to French-Canadian ambitions and interests and seldom succeeded in winning more than a handful of seats in Quebec, with a few notable exceptions:

• the 1930 election, in which Richard Bedford Bennett surprisingly led the party to a thin majority government victory by securing twenty-four seats in rural Quebec;
• the 1958 election, in which John Diefenbaker rode the backing of the right-leaning Union Nationale provincial government in Quebec to 50 of the province's 75 seats; and
• the elections of 1984 and 1988, when party leader Brian Mulroney, a fluently bilingual Quebecker, built an electoral coalition that included Quebec nationalists.

The Party never fully recovered from the fragmentation of Mulroney's broad coalition in the late 1980s resulting from English Canada's failure to ratify the Meech Lake Accord. Immediately prior to its merger with the Canadian Alliance, it held only 15 of 301 seats in the Canadian House of Commons. The party did not hold more than 20 seats in Parliament between 1993 and 2003.