A history of uncomfortable coalitions

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2021 (1578 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has declared he has no interest in joining a coalition led by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But that does not mean Singh and the NDP won’t support Trudeau’s minority government in the months ahead.

With 25 seats, Singh and the NDP hold the balance of power in the House of Commons — as does the Bloc Québécois led by Yves-François Blanchet, which has 32 seats. Both parties can extract changes to future Liberal legislation (such as extending COVID-19 benefits) in exchange for their precious votes.

But the odds of Singh or Blanchet bringing down the Trudeau government any time soon are very low. It’s likely only a blatant scandal would convince either leader to force yet another federal election and give the Conservatives an opportunity to form a government.

Such political bartering has been going on for a century. A hundred years ago, on Dec. 6, 1921, the newly elected Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King eked out a victory and embarked on his first term as prime minister.

King led both a slim majority and a minority at various times from 1921 to 1925. The Liberals’ traditional rival, the Conservative Party — officially in this election the “National Liberal and Conservative Party” — was a remnant of the Union government from the First World War years and was led by Arthur Meighen.

However, Meighen was detested in Quebec for being the architect of conscription, and hated in the West for his unwavering support of the protective tariff and also, by some, for helping quash the Winnipeg General Strike. In a first for a Canadian election, Meighen and the Conservatives came in third, winning only 50 seats.

The most surprising outcome in 1921 were the 64 seats won by the Progressive Party, a loose political association formed in 1919 by farmers who had lost patience with both traditional parties. Progressives opposed the tariff and more broadly objected to a political system that they argued put the interests of the “privileged class” ahead of those of the “masses.”

The party’s reluctant leader was Thomas Crerar, the head of the Winnipeg-based United Grain Growers. He had been a cabinet minister in the Union government until he resigned in June 1919. As head of the Progressives, he was supported by John W. Dafoe, then the influential editor of the Free Press.

The Progressives, which were internally divided between the moderates loyal to Crerar and the more radical faction led by Henry Wise Wood in Alberta, had no desire serve as the official Opposition. Hence Meighen and the Conservatives, though they had won less seats, functioned in that role.

King rightly viewed the Progressives as “Liberals in a hurry,” and sympathized with their anti-tariff policies and social reform and humanitarian outlook. He also guessed correctly that he could count on Progressive support to maintain his government.

While many Progressives did not trust King or want to be members of a political party that was dominated by protectionist easterners, they feared a Meighen-led Conservative government more.

The legacy of the 1921 election is more notable because it also was the first time a large number of women in Canada could vote federally — excluding Indigenous women across the country and Asian women in B.C. and Saskatchewan (as per provincial law).

Agnes Macphail, a 31-year-old United Farmers of Ontario-Progressive candidate — and, depending on your perspective, a pioneering feminist from rural Ontario — was the first woman elected to the House of Commons (among the four that ran in the election). But it wasn’t easy. As she later recalled, “I won that election (in 1921) in spite of being a woman.”

By the time Macphail lost her seat in the 1940 election, the Progressives had vanished from the federal scene. Some followed the lead of Crerar, who moved back to the Liberals and became a cabinet minister in King’s government in 1935 and was later appointed to the Senate.

Other disenchanted Progressives, Macphail among them, splintered off from the main party and played a pivotal role in establishing the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in the early 1930s — which was reorganized into the NDP in 1961.

Farmers’ parties had more success provincially, most significantly in Manitoba in 1922 under John Bracken, who was premier for the next 20 years as leader of the Progressive Party of Manitoba, which later joined with the provincial Liberals as the Liberal-Progressive coalition.

It is Bracken who was responsible for the Progressives still being part of Canadian politics, though in a much different way. In 1942, he was recruited to lead the federal Conservative party, then struggling to reinvent itself. His one condition was that the party change its name to the awkward sounding “Progressive-Conservative,” which endured nationally until 2003 and still endures in Manitoba, Ontario and several other provinces.

Over the years, Progressive Conservatives have asserted they are “socially progressive and fiscally conservative.” But the moniker Bracken saddled them with led to decades of internal divisions between the two sides that continue to the present day.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.