Canadian Political Parties

How Canadian Political Parties Work

Political parties hold a great deal of power in the Canadian system of government. Indeed, the Canadian parliamentary system would not be able to function without them. As we learned in previous chapters, the party that elects the most members to the House of Commons forms the Government of Canada and gets to pick the prime minister and his cabinet. The party with the second-largest number of seats forms the Official Opposition.

Political parties in Canada are structured in a very hierarchical fashion. There’s always a single leader at the top, who serves as all-powerful boss of the party. The leader formulates party policy and determines where his party stands on the political issues of the day. All politicians below him, including members of the House of Commons and Senate are expected to support and endorse his agenda. Politicians who misbehave can be expelled from the party by the leader. In Canadian federal elections, party leaders run as candidates for prime minister.

Party members in Canada are individuals who pay a yearly fee (usually around $15) to hold a card-carrying membership in a political party. These are the people who elect the party leader and local candidates, and vote on various internal matters like amendments to the party constitution. Different parties organize their internal affairs differently, and most notably, use different systems for electing their party leaders (see sidebar). Though being a party member carries a number of perks, it’s usually estimated that only about one or two per cent of Canadians actually hold membership in a political party. Canadians who decide to be party members tend to be people who are quite personally invested in politics, including relatives of politicians and their employees, or people who are very involved in political activism, such as the sorts of people who regularly campaign for politicians during elections. Party membership tends to increase during party leadership elections, though.

The Canadian Party System Today

Canada has what is sometimes called the “two party-plus” system. This means the country is usually dominated by two large parties — one of the left (broadly favouring social reform and activist government), and one of the right (broadly favouring social tradition and limited government) — there is almost always a strong third-place party as well, either of the further-left or further-right, that threatens to bump off one of the “big two.”

Historically, the Canadian two-party plus system has been dominated by the centre-left Liberal Party and a centre-right Conservative Party (that has gone by several different names). Since the 1980s or so Canada’s dominant third-place party has been the further-left NDP. There is also a consistently fourth-place party known as the Bloc Quebecois which is devoted to Quebec separatism, but it obviously has fairly narrow appeal. People sometimes consider the Green Party of Canada to be Canada’s fifth “major party” but it has never won more than three seats in a federal election.

Current Canadian Party Leaders

The Liberal Party of Canada

The Liberal Party of Canada is the party that currently rules Canada, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (b. 1971). It is the country’s oldest political party and the most historically successful. When Liberals are feeling particularly boastful, they like to call themselves “Canada’s Natural Governing Party” in recognition of the fact that they’ve held power for such long periods of Canadian history.

Born as a movement of reform-minded, middle class French-Canadians and Catholics in the mid 19th century, by the early 20th century the Liberals had evolved into a more generic, centrist party favouring traditional British liberal values of free markets and personal responsibility, as well as tolerant relations between French and English Canadians. Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919), who championed all of the above to become the most successful and long-reigning of Canada’s early Liberal prime ministers, remains an iconic figure of commonsense, moderate Canadian liberalism of this period.

After World War II (1939-1945), the Liberals moved in a more notably left-wing direction, particularly during the long reign of Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000, ruled 1968-1979 and 1980-1984). Suspicious of the free market and worried about social division, Trudeau believed a larger, more activist Canadian government could help alleviate the country’s social and economic ills, and create what he dubbed a “Just Society” of compassion and equality. A worsening financial situation in the 1990s caused the next two Liberal prime ministers, Jean Chretien (b. 1934, served 1993-2003) and Paul Martin (b. 1938, served 2003-2006) to move more to the right on fiscal matters, adopting generally conservative ideas about the importance of keeping taxes low and budgets balanced.

The Liberal Party Today

Now led byPierre  Trudeau’s son, Justin Trudeau, the modern Liberal Party portrays itself as a party that is fiscally responsible, but socially progressive. Liberals are strongly supportive of unrestricted abortion, LGBT rights, and high rates of immigration, but also favour a free market economy that is not subject to overly burdensome regulation. The party is not as inclined towards “big government” solutions as it was in the past, but still opposes right-wingers who call for scaling back social programs such as universal health care and old age pensions. The need to balance responsible economic development with strategies to combat climate change has steadily risen to become a defining Liberal priority as well.

The Conservative Party of Canada

The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) is Canada’s second-largest party in parliament, and the party that currently forms the Official Opposition to Justin Trudeau’s ruling Liberals. It is also technically Canada’s newest party, having been founded in 2003 by merging the Progressive Conservative Party with the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Party. This represented an effort to rebuild a single, unified conservative party of the sort that had existed for most of Canadian history.

Progressive Conservative Party of Canada

The Progressive Conservatives (PC) were, until 2006, the only party other than the Liberals that ever governed Canada. It traced its origins to the “Tories” of the 19th century, a group of Canadians in the colonial era who defined themselves through their staunch loyalty to British rule, Protestant Christianity, and English culture (“Tory” is still used as a nickname for Canadian conservatives to this day). During the 20th century, the party was mostly a broad alliance of people who were not Liberals, but was still considered primarily a party for English Canadian interests. The PCs underwent a significant ideological shift under the leadership of Brian Mulroney (1939-2024), a Quebec-born corporate CEO who became PC leader and then prime minister from 1984 to 1993. Mulroney’s rise represented the triumph of a new flavor of conservative thought, based mostly around free-market economics, that swept much of the western world during the 1980s. Mulroney’s second term in office proved deeply unpopular, however, and in the 1993 election the PC party was all but wiped out, plummeting from 169 seats in Parliament to only two.

The Reform Party

The PC party had always had its share of critics on the right.  In Canada’s western provinces, which tend to be the most conservative and religious parts of the country, there was growing sentiment during the 1980s that Prime Minister Mulroney was excessively moderate, and thus little different from his Liberal predecessors. Many also felt his government was too indifferent to the plight of Canadians living outside Ontario and Quebec, particularly Canadians in rural areas. 1987 thus saw the creation of the Reform Party of Canada (later renamed the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance Party, or just the Canadian Alliance), a new populist right-wing party that ate into much of the old PC base and elected dozens of hardline conservatives to the Canadian Parliament during the 1990s and early 2000s. The existence of two rival conservative parties was soon blamed for splitting the anti-Liberal vote, however, and in 2003, the two parties merged into a new, compromise party: the Conservative Party of Canada. In 2006, Stephen Harper (b. 1959), a former leader of the Canadian Alliance, was elected Canada’s first prime minister from the Conservative Party.

The Conservative Party Today

If forced to define themselves, today’s Conservatives would describe their party as one that favours low taxes, low regulation of business, smaller, less bossy government, a strong regime of law-and-order, a strong military and respect for traditional values — particularly in contrast to so-called “woke” priorities that are seen to be overly preoccupied with race, gender, and sexuality-based activism.

In 2017, following the electoral defeat of Prime Minister Harper, the Conservatives elected former speaker of the House of Commons Andrew Scheer (b. 1979) as their new leader. After failing to unseat the Liberals in the 2019 federal election, Scheer resigned in 2020 and was replaced by former cabinet minister Erin O’Toole (b. 1973), who in turn failed to unseat the Liberals in the 2021 election, and was removed by the party in early 2022. Scheer, and especially O’Toole, were considered fairly ideologically moderate, and partially in response to this, in September of 2022 the party elected former cabinet minister Pierre Poilievre (b. 1979) as their fourth-ever leader, who is usually described as more populist. Poilievre, who is known for attracting large audiences to his rallies where he rails against the powers of “gatekeepers” in elite institutions like the bureaucracy and mainstream media will accordingly mark a much sharper contrast, in both style and substance, when he runs against Prime Minister Trudeau in the next general election, currently scheduled for the fall of 2025.

The NDP

Founded during the midst of the Great Depression (1929-1939), Canada’s New Democratic Party, first known as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), was originally a doctrinaire socialist party dedicated to the democratic overthrow of the capitalist system and implementation of a government-planned economy in its place. In the decades since, the NDP has moved in a more moderate direction, and today champions the goal of a social democratic society with a “mixed economy,” in which the government tightly regulates the economy but doesn’t run it. Today, the NDP is considered quite similar to the Liberal Party in terms of beliefs, but takes a more aggressively progressive position on taxing the wealthy and large corporations, environmental regulation, and non-interventionist foreign policy.

Canada has never had an NDP prime minister and for most of its history the NDP has consistently come in a distant third or fourth place in the parliamentary seat count. Only once, in 2011, did it come in second, briefly surpassing the Liberals. The NDP has exercised the most political power during periods when seats in the Canadian parliament were quite evenly divided, meaning even a small number of votes could determine whether a vote passed or fails. Important Canadian social programs such as old age pensions and national medicare are usually at least partially credited to NDP deal-making in closely divided parliaments of the past.

Following the 2011 death of the popular Jack Layton (see sidebar), the NDP elected Quebec politician Thomas Mulcair (b. 1954) as leader, reflecting the growing power of that province in the party. After a disappointing showing in the 2015 general election, in 2016 the NDP voted to remove Mulcair and in 2017 Jagmeet Singh (b. 1979) was elected in his place. A former lawyer and the son of Sikh immigrants from India, Singh is the first non-white, non-Christian person to lead a Canadian political party. His known for his aggressive outreach to young voters through social media, but has now twice led the NDP to disappointing showings in two back-to-back elections in 2019 and 2021.

The Bloc Quebecois

As we discuss in more detail in the Quebec chapter, one of the biggest issues in contemporary Canadian politics is whether or not the French-speaking province of Quebec should separate from Canada and form its own country. In Canadian political lingo, people who support this idea are known as separatists, and the Bloc Quebecois is Canada’s leading separatist political party.

Founded in 1990 by Lucien Bouchard (b. 1938), a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister, the Bloc was Canada’s first national political party to openly support Quebec separatism, and remained the most popular political party in the province until quite recently. The Bloc only runs candidates in Quebec, and for this reason, it’s impossible for it to ever form the government of Canada. But that’s not its point — by voting Bloc, Quebecers are expressing their disdain for the Canadian system and essentially opting out of federal politics altogether. As Bloc MPs would put it, they are going to Ottawa to defend the interests of Quebec and nothing else.

Ideologically, the Bloc is quite left-wing, perhaps unsurprisingly considering Quebec is said to be the most left-wing region in all of North America. Though they won’t ever be in a position to impose an agenda of their own, Bloc MPs do sit in Parliament and vote just like everyone else (and, controversially, collect their paycheques and pensions, too). The party had a very poor showing in the 2011 and 2015 elections, and suffered from chronic leadership instability following the departure of longtime party leader Gilles Duceppe (b. 1947) in 2015. The party staged a big comeback in the 2019  general election under new leader Yves-François Blanchet (b. 1965), however. Blanchet is a former minister in the separatist administration that governed Quebec from 2012 to 2014; under his leadership the Bloc has recovered its former losses and once again sits as Parliament’s third-biggest party.

The Green Party of Canada

The Green Party of Canada is a relatively new player on the Canadian political scene. Though it’s been around for more than 30 years, it did not begin winning a significant number of votes until the early 2000s, and did not elect its first Member of Parliament until 2011.

Initially, the Greens were simply a one-issue party exclusively devoted to raising awareness of “the environment,” until former leaders Jim Harris (b. 1961) and especially Elizabeth May (b. 1954, see sidebar), sought to broaden the Greens’ appeal and market themselves more as centre-left populists. Today, Green candidates tend to try to stand out by presenting themselves as respectable political “outsiders” who are less corrupt and cynical than politicians from other parties. It is common for Greens to advocate for sweeping reforms to the Canadian political system, including changing the electoral system which they say is currently biased against small parties like theirs. The Greens’ “outsider” status helps the party attract the support of many Canadians who have outside-the-mainstream opinions on things like medicine, disease, and the role of large corporations in Canadian society. That said, the environment still remains a major Green preoccupation, particularly climate change, and the party is known for advocating the most dramatic opposition to things like fossil fuels and mining.

The Canadian news media has treated the Greens as a “major” party since the 2000s, a period in which the Greens began consistently winning about 3-6  per cent of the popular vote, but very few seats. In 2019 they elected three members of parliament – a new record — though in 2021 that number shrunk to just two. Green parties have proven more successful at the provincial level, however, and throughout the 2010s, a handful of “Greens” were elected to the legislatures of several provinces, a fact which has helped establish the party as the consistent third or fourth-place party in many provinces (see below), even as they languish in fifth place nationally. The Green Party has led by Elizabeth May for most of the last 15 years, first from 2006 to 2019, and now 2022 on.

The People’s Party

In 2018, former Conservative cabinet minister and member of Parliament Maxime Bernier (b. 1963) loudly quit the Conservative Party and announced he was forming a new party, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). Bernier had long been one of the most outspoken and eccentric members of the Conservative Party, known for his libertarian opinions often to the right of his party’s mainstream. He claimed his decision to quit the party was motivated by his opposition to what he considered excessive moderation under former leader Andrew Scheer (see above). To date, his new Peoples’ Party has mostly defined itself as being more conservative than the Conservatives, particularly on issues relating to immigration and multiculturalism.

The PPC performed poorly in the 2019 general election — its first — winning only 1% of the vote. In the 2021 election it faired significantly better, winning 5% of the vote (but zero seats), a benchmark often thought of as representing the standard for what constitutes a “major” party in Canada. The party’s improved showing has been widely attributed to the strong position Bernier took in opposition to various public safety measures that were imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020- ), including masking, vaccine passports, mandatory vaccines, and sometimes even vaccines in general. It remains unclear if the PPC is evolving into a permanent player in Canadian politics, or if its success in 2021 was simply the result of a populist backlash to a very particular situation.

Fringe Parties

Beyond the three major parties and the two smaller ones, Canada has over a dozen other legally registered parties that are all quite unpopular and generally obscure. Usually referred to as fringe parties for their limited appeal and often eccentric or extreme political agendas, they are not considered very relevant to Canadian politics. At best, they can sometimes “spoil” races in very close elections by pulling votes away from the mainstream parties.

Based on the number of votes cast, Canada’s most popular fringe parties are the Libertarian Party of Canada, which believes in the abolishment of most government functions in favor of a more market-based society, and the Christian Heritage Party, which promotes an agenda of evangelical Christian morality. Of course, “popular” in this context is quite relative — the combined vote total of both parties in the 2019 Canadian election was only around 27,000.

• Forty-Third General Election Official Voting Results, Elections Canada

Independents

Technically, the most successful political movement outside of the mainstream parties comes from politicians who belong to no party at all. These are known as independent, non-partisan or non-affiliated politicians. In the 2019 general election, independent candidates won over 73,000 votes, though only one independent member of parliament was elected, former Liberal attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould (b. 1971).

It is generally considered very difficult for independent politicians to get elected in Canada, as they lack access to the money, professional resources, staff and assistants that established political parties — even fringe parties — are able to offer to candidates. In rare cases where they are successful, such as in Wilson-Raybould’s case, they are usually politicians who used to be members of a party, but were kicked out for some reason or another. It should be noted, however, that many lower-ranking politicians in Canada such as mayors, city councillors, and members of local community boards do not usually run for their offices as members of political parties (though they may still be party members personally).

Dead Political Parties

As you may have noticed from some of the history above, Canadian politics can be fairly volatile, with parties rising and falling with great speed. Here are a couple of parties that have seen their moment of glory pass.

The Social Credit Party

The Social Credit Party (sometimes called simply Social Credit) is Canada’s most recently deceased political party. It held influence in various parts of the country, to varying degrees, from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Properly speaking, “Social Credit” is a widely discredited monetary philosophy based on the writings of Major C. H. Douglas (1879-1952), a Scottish engineer who rather naively argued that a lot of social problems could be solved if governments would simply print more money and give it to their citizens. During the chaos of the Great Depression (1929-1939), this idea sounded reasonable enough, and Canadians elected several Social Credit MPs to parliament, and in the province of Alberta, the local Social Credit Party was elected to power.

As the years went on and Social Credit grew into a more serious and sophisticated political movement, Major Douglas’ theories were gradually abandoned and Social Credit became a fairly standard right-wing political party with a strong emphasis on Christian morality and populism. Its strongest support remained in some of the most rural and religious parts of the country, particularly rural Alberta and Quebec. Though the “Socreds” would remain in power in Alberta until 1971, and ruled British Columbia for most of the period between 1952 and 1991, it never elected more than 30 members to the Parliament of Canada, where it routinely languished in third or fourth place. By the 1990s, most Socred supporters had migrated to other parties, and what remained of the old Social Credit organizations were quietly dismantled or dissolved.

The Progressives

An intentionally disorganized, philosophically vague movement, the Canadian Progressives were a loose coalition of angry farmers in the 1920s who formed a number of short-lived political parties to protest the changing economic circumstances of their era. Even in the 1920s, it was clear the Canadian economy was moving away from agriculture as its dominant industry, and many farmers felt their plight was being ignored or undermined by the nation’s political elite. Militant “farmers’ rights” movements began to arise in response, and the 1920s saw a string of surprise victories for them, including the election of farmer governments in Ontario (1919-1923) and Alberta (1921-1935), and dozens of farmer-backed MPs in the Canadian House of Commons. From 1920 to 1926 they were organized into a single national movement known as the National Progressive Party.

The Progressives never really had a clear plan on how to govern or what to do with power, however, and they declined as quickly as they had risen. During the Great Depression (1929-1939), much of their voting base migrated to parties that offered more ideological solutions to economic complaints – either Social Credit on the right, or the socialists on the left. The term “progressive” lives on to this day, but is now used as a generic term for Canadians on the liberal-left.

Provincial Parties

In early Canadian history, the political parties found in the Canadian provinces matched closely with the parties seen in Ottawa. Which is to say, most provincial governments operated under a two-party system divided between the Liberals on one side and the Conservatives on the other (and the NDP in third place). Today, however, most provinces have evolved unique two-party systems that reflect the “left/right” split in a variety of different ways.

• In British Columbia, the dominant parties are the B.C. NDP and the B.C. Liberals. Since the collapse of the British Columbia Social Credit Party in the 1990s, the B.C. Liberals have enjoyed the support of a voter base that is generally more conservative than that of other Liberal parties in Canada. The B.C. Green Party has recently risen to become the province’s third-party force, and currently has three members in the provincial legislature.
• The Alberta party system has realigned dramatically in recent years — the current system pits the ruling United Conservative Party of Alberta, which was formed in 2017 by merging the moderate Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta and the more ideological Wildrose Party, against the Alberta NDP.
• Saskatchewan is ruled by the Saskatchewan Party, which is a coalition of Liberal and Conservative supporters, but is generally considered broadly conservative. The opposition party is the Saskatchewan NDP, which has ruled for long stretches of the province’s history.
• The dominant parties in Manitoba are the Manitoba NDP and the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives.
• Ontario has probably the healthiest “traditional” three-party system in Canada, with the Ontario Liberals, Ontario Progressive Conservatives, and Ontario NDP all holding significant amounts of seats in the provincial legislature. All have run the government at some point over the last 30 years.
• Quebec has a very unique party system completely unlike any other province. Currently, the province is ruled by the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), which is usually considered centre-right and  populist-nationalist. The other main parties are the pro-separation Parti Quebecois (PQ), the anti-separatist Quebec Liberal Party, and a far-left party called Quebec Solidaire. Until the late 1970s, Quebec also had a strong conservative party known as the Union Nationale, or National Union.
• New Brunswick’s legislature currently has Liberal, Progressive Conservative, and Green members, as well members from the People’s Alliance Party, which is a conservative party specifically concerned with the rights of the province’s English-speaking majority (New Brunswick is Canada’s only officially bilingual province).
• Nova Scotia has a three party system between the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, and New Democrats. Nova Scotia is the only province in Atlantic Canada that has ever had an NDP government.
• Newfoundland has an ordinary two-party system between Progressive Conservatives and Liberals.
• Prince Edward Island is currently ruled by the Progressive Conservative Party of PEI, and was previously run by the Liberal Party of PEI. The PEI Green Party staged an upset in the 2019 election and became the party with the second-most seats in the legislature.
• The Yukon territory is split between the Yukon Liberals and the Yukon Party, which is what the Yukon Progressive Conservative Party renamed itself in 1992.
• Canada’s two far-northern territories, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, have very small parliaments that don’t use political parties.