UBC Press gratefully acknowledges financial support for our publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. Focusing closely on the electoral behavior of a single federal party over the past thirty years, this book offers the story of the Liberal Party of Canada's (LPC) nine election campaigns from 1974 through 2004. None enjoyed commercial distribution or the like wide media attention. enjoyed by Graham Fraser's Playing for Keeps of Rick.
The electoral savvy of the LPC may help us better understand not only how it came out on top in nineteen out of twenty-eight elections in the twentieth century, but also what its chances are of maintaining that winning record into the twentieth century. the first. By 2004, Canada had entered a turbulent phase, having experienced nearly two decades of liberalized trade on the North American continent and a corresponding contraction of social, cultural and environmental programs designed by Keynesian governments. For citizens who are avid fans of Canada's most popular spectacle sport after hockey, it offers a wealth of detail to help them understand the inner workings of the Liberal Party in its electoral modus operandi and the general dynamics of federal election campaigns.
The body of the book now consists of the nine contests themselves, beginning with the 1974 campaign and ending with the 2004 election. These nine essays are preceded by an introduction that, sketching the historical background on Canadian party politics, 1974, provides a context for understanding how the federal party system went through various transformations from Confederation and beyond; how national policies evolved to meet the changing demands of Canadian society; what kind of organizational and financial base the Liberal Party had developed; why Pierre Trudeau tried unsuccessfully to introduce democratic practices into the inner workings of the party: in short, how the Liberal Party had become what it was by the time of the 1974 election. The conclusion ties the record of six electoral victories and three defeats from the hegemonic party of Canada from 1974 to 2004 to the contradictory nature of the evolving party system, both its internal fragmentation and its integration into a global market.
For Jean Chrétien, the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada who lived and breathed political battle, politics was less about the ends than the means, less about policy than politics, more about the hunt than the quarry.
THE BIG RED MACHINE
In the Internet age, some say history is useless. The first, the clientelistic system, extended from Confederation in 1867 to the end of the First World War. The third, the pan-Canadian system, was born in the political and social upheavals of the early 1960s.
This fascinating change occurred in the election of 1896, when the Liberal Party expanded its previously limited appeal to become the national political formation that would govern Canada for most of the next century. It was during Mackenzie King's second decade as party leader that the membership wing of the Liberal Party began to take its current shape. His regime saw the erosion of King's governing formula and the beginning of the Liberal Party's steady departure from western Canada.18 St.
No one at the time bothered to object when Cockfield, Brown and Co., the government advertising agency, paid the salary of the party's national director. Only once in the course of twenty-three elections did the Liberals take a smaller percentage of the seats than the votes cast in the province. That year, voting support for the Liberal Party was 46 per cent, which, in a national reversal, gave the Liberals only twenty-five of the province's seventy-five seats.
The Liberal Party is notable for its sympathy for the United States and for its willingness to accept Canada's increasing integration into the English-speaking part of the North American community. The size of party membership varied considerably, not only from region to region, but even from year to year. Because the vast majority of personnel manning the party's power centers in the provinces, regions, districts, and municipalities were unpaid volunteers, their turnover was frequent, further reducing grassroots continuity, cohesion, and influence.
The kaleidoscopic nature of the Liberal Party's internal organization was a manifestation of its failure to evolve from its simple beginnings as an electoral alliance into a "modern" mass structure. Cell 13, a group of Toronto reformers who took control of the Liberal Party under Walter Gordon in the late 1950s, intended to correct the party's faults with a more democratic strategy. The leadership convention prompted by the retirement of Lester Pearson in 1968 captured the imagination of the Canadian public more than anything the Liberal Party had done in decades.
However, as a veteran of the campaign waged in the 1950s to make provincial politics in Quebec more open and democratic, Pierre Trudeau was clearly committed to-. The concept of a second phase that would articulate the riders' views also assumed that the grassroots of the party were keen to contribute to party policy. When it became clear that none of their policy positions would be accepted for the 1972 election campaign platform, the morale of the party core dropped markedly.
By December 1972, the most active members of the Liberal Party in Ontario were showing a noticeable level of unhappiness with their political involvement.
