Unite The Right - 1987 - 1993: Fragmentation On The Political Right

1993: Fragmentation On The Political Right

The Reform Party came into being in 1987, due in part to opposition to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government that ruled Canada from 1984 to 1993. A significant number of Western Canadians had strongly disliked what they perceived as the Mulroney government's pro-Quebec approach and rampant use of patronage. They also viewed the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord as not in the West's best interests. Other Western conservatives felt that Mulroney's government was not sufficiently neo-liberal in its fiscal taxation and federal spending policies while some social conservatives were critical of the government's failed attempts to regulate and reduce abortion in Canada.

In the 1993 election when the upstart Reform Party won 52 seats in the west, and the once-powerful PCs led by newly minted Prime Minister Kim Campbell were reduced to only two seats in Parliament. Both parties were, however, almost completely shut out of Ontario and Quebec in this election, and also in the elections of 1997 and 2000. The two central Canadian provinces together represented over half the seats in the House of Commons; in the 1993, 1997 and 2000 elections, the total number of central Canadian seats held, collectively, by the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance and the PCs never rose above six, out of a total of over 170 available seats.

With two right-wing parties competing for power, it became apparent that unseating the governing Liberals would be next to impossible. In the 1997 election, both the PCs and the Reform Party respectively polled roughly 19% each in popular support. Reform emerged with 60 Western seats and Official Opposition status, while the demoralized PCs emerged from the brink of oblivion with 20 Eastern seats and regained party status (a minimum of 12 seats is required for official party status in the Canadian House of Commons, allowing the party to have seats on parliamentary committees, guaranteed speaking time in the Commons, additional office space in the east and west blocks of Parliament, and multi-million dollar federal funding for party research and staffing). More importantly, the Liberals emerged with only a five-seat majority in the election, and many pundits suggested that the combined Tory and Reform votes would have been enough to unseat the Liberals or at least reduce them to minority status.

The Liberals under Jean Chrétien had governed Canada since 1993, and were never really threatened by the divided right during the Chrétien era. Especially important in the Liberals' electoral success was the province of Ontario. From 1993 to 2004, the Liberals utterly dominated Canada's most populous province. Both Reform and the PC Party received many votes, but because of the first past the post (FPTP) system, this was not enough to win more than a handful of Ontario's approximately 103 seats. At the same time, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, who some suggested were kindred spirits in policy and direction to Reform and Blue Tory PCs, had formed a provincial government under Premier Mike Harris.