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Political Party Profiles

There were three main political parties running in the 1988 election:

Progressive Conservatives

As a result of being able to gain the support of Quebec and the western provinces, the PC Party had won the largest majority in Canada’s history in the 1984 election. The Progressive Conservatives were less focused on preserving a strong central government and were more comfortable with a decentralized federal system. The Conservative style of campaigning focused on regional politics and clever strategy. After the 1984 election, the party was plagued with scandal. In order to get the party back on the right track, the Conservatives felt a national project that could unite Canada was needed. The Free Trade Agreement was touted by the PC Party as an innovative, forward-moving policy that proved the PCs were committed to positive change.

Liberals

Under Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals had pushed for a strong centralized government. For the Liberals, that meant a strong national government that would intervene in the economy, when necessary. Under this model, the Liberals had patriated the constitution and brought the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the Canada. This approach proved to be electorally disastrous. The Economic crisis of the early 1980s damaged the Liberals’ credibility all across the country. When they tried to increase Ottawa’s revenue with western oil (the National Energy Program), the Liberals lost much of their already meager support in the West. Many Quebeckers also resented Ottawa’s power and the 1982 constitutional settlement. After a long period of Liberal power in Canada, the 1984 election left the party in tatters.

Not surprisingly, the period since 1984 had been tumultuous for the party. Preserving party unity had been difficult. Liberal leader John Turner’s victory over Jean Chretien left the party divided. These divisions were aggravated by the fact that the major policy initiatives of the Mulroney government – free trade and Meech Lake – divided the Liberals internally. The Meech Lake Accord directly challenged the Trudeau vision of Canada, but the Liberals supported it in order to regain support in Quebec. The Liberals had historically been the party that supported free trade, but the party chose to oppose the free trade agreement. Adding to the Liberals’ problems was the surging strength of the New Democratic Party, threatening to supplant the Liberals on the left of the political spectrum.

New Democratic Party

A social democratic party, the NDP (and its previous incarnation as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) had been a small but important presence in Canadian electoral politics for decades. The 1984 election had seen a major boost to the party’s fortunes. The NDP finished with 30 seats, only 10 behind the Liberals. There was much talk of the possibility of the NDP surpassing the Liberals in the 1988 election. Buoyed by the leadership of the ever-popular Ed Broadbent, the NDP had high hopes for this election.

Unlike the Liberals, the NDP was not plagued by the same internal divisions. The NDP was unequivocally opposed to free trade, believing that once the government withdrew from regulating trade, transnational corporations would move in and take control of business. The NDP’s concern was that all of these changes would come at the expense of workers. They were also concerned that too much American influence in the Canadian economy would be a threat to Canada ’s social programs. Although the NDP’s support of Meech Lake raised a few eyebrows because of the Accord’s potential to limit the federal government’s role in social programs, the Accord was not as significant a problem for the NDP because the party’s presence in Quebec was negligible.

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