John RapleyONE DAY in the future, the political history of Canada may be written as the history of its governing Liberal party. The Liberals, who came to dominate much of the 20th century, look set to open the next century with a degree of hegemony unrivalled in most of the industrial democracies.
Over the course of the 20th century, a string of federal leaders found ways of reconciling this huge, sprawling country's diverse and often competing cultural, linguistic and regional groupings. What emerged was the prototypical ideology of the centre which, if bland, was at least inoffensive. The Canadian way of finding harmony by privatising culture and keeping differences to a minimum served to reconcile differences in a country whose sense of unity was seldom strong.
By capturing the centre and bridging the language divide, the Liberals came to be known as Canada's 'natural governing party,' the only party to consistently secure representation from all of the country's regions and ethnic and linguistic groups. Opposition parties were generally confined to regional bastions. As for the federal Conservative Party, it was reduced to an anglophone party, all but excluded from the French province of Quebec. The few times it managed to crack Quebec and take power in Ottawa, it typically did so by striking alliances with Quebec nationalists, who soon presented the governing coalition with tensions too great to resolve.
So it goes today. By bringing erstwhile Quebec separatists into his government, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney managed to return the Conservatives to power in 1984, but the victory would prove pyrrhic. By 1993, the party had split into rival English and French factions and gone down to crushing defeat, from which it has yet to recover. If a new generation of Canadian politicians has its way, the party never will recover. What initially rent the Conservatives was a rebellion by western Parliamentarians who veered off to form their own party, which they called Reform.
Coming from a region which is solidly anglophone, conservative and more influenced by evangelical Christianity than the east (where most Canadians still reside), the Reform Party gave vent to all sorts of populist anger. Needless to say, its anti-French undercurrents backed Quebec nationalists into a corner, and they bolted to form their own party, the Bloc Quebecois. What there was of the Conservative centre was all but hollowed out.
In recent months, seeing that the opposition to the Liberals is now divided and has retreated to regional pockets, the Reform leadership began a drive to reunite the Canadian right into a party it called the United Alternative. Now named the Canadian Alliance, this party claims the only alternative to permanent Liberal rule is for Canada's conservatives to put aside their differences.
The problem, so far, is that the Conservative Party could not agree more. We are and always have been the Canadian right, it has said, so come back home. Conservative leader Joe Clark has refused to have anything to do with the new Alliance Party. So, Alliance's first leader, Stockwell Day, has started pulling the carpet out from under Mr. Clark by appealing to the Conservative grassroots and many of its regional organisers. Needless to say, this strategy is, at least for now, serving to divide as much as to unite the right.
Furthermore, in Quebec, the opposition to the Liberals comes not from the right, but from the left. Represented by the Bloc Quebecois, the separatist faction also has social democratic leanings. While Mr. Day believes he can square the Bloc's demands for Quebec autonomy with his own call for decentralisation (in this attack on federal power, the Alliance resembles American Republicans), hugging up separatists and lefties does not go down well in western Canada. Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien has no doubt taken delight in referring to the Alliance leader as Blockwell Day.
Indeed, the Liberals must be enjoying this drama immensely. Recent polls suggest that, secure in their hold on the Canadian centre, they would win a landslide were an election held today.
So far, the movement to unite the right is doing little more than cement the Liberal hold on power. Few Canadians may feel a deep love for the Liberals, but at least they can stand them, and this seems to be Canada's winning ticket.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
