AHC: Canada has 2-Party System similar to the USA

Challenge: Have Canada have a 2-party system similar to the system in OTL's USA.
Simple. Canada had a two party system from 1872 to 1921, with every election since then being multi-partisan. All you'd need to is prevent the Progressive party from winning any seats in 1921, and you'd preserve the classical two party Liberal/Conservative party system.
 
Creating a stable, two-party only system à l'Américaine in any parliamentary democracy would be quite difficult. There are two things that make the US system operate as it does:

1) With a limit of 435 representatives, each Congressman now representes a district with an average population of over 750 000. That exceeds by a factor of three the average size of a Lower House district in Japan and more than 7x that average population of a riding in Canada, a UK constituency, or a French circonscription. The smaller size of Canadian and European electoral districts is more conducive (IMHO) to third parties gaining footholds, even in FTTP systems, than mega US style districts.

2) The two party system is maintained through the party-primary system. While a couple of states have open primaries (LA and CA at least), most states maintain a party-primary system which, combined with partisan decennial reapportionment, creates a situation where the vast majority of the districts are decided by the results of the "dominant" party's primary.

Actually, I should probably include partisan control of reapportionment as a third point. Look at a state like Ohio. Even though it has voted for Obama the past two elections and only gave Bush narrow margins of victory in his two elections, the current apportionment was designed to create a 12-4 Republican majority in its Congressional delegation by the Republican controlled state legislature.

So in other words, be happy Canada or any other enlightened country doesn't suffer from this stiffling, jury-rigged system we call American governance!
 
On a somewhat related topic, I believe that a strict two-party system tends to create a more conservative culture. In Canada, almost all the progressive legislation originated in the CCF/NDP, and was later co-opted by the Liberals, who passed some version of that legislation.

I assume that the reason they adopted this sort of legislation is to prevent the CCF/NDP from gaining electoral support by attracting all the progressive-minded voters. In a strict two-party system, this dynamic does not exist, the rational approach for the more left-wing party is to stay just a hair to the left of the more right-wing party, and if the right-wing party moves further to the right (as it has been doing for decades in the USA), to track right as well, in order to capture as many votes as possible. In a Canadian-type system, this would be electoral suicide, as the leftmost party would scoop up most of the left-wing and many of the centrist votes.

My guess would be that at least three credible parties are needed to keep the political centre of gravity in line with the social centre of gravity. A two-party system would have little restraint against the two centres of gravity diverging (in the case of the USA today, toward the right).
 
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Well if Canada had a 2 party system chances are it will split along Franco-Anglo lines. The problem was that it was in no way sustainable since it originally ended up in deadlock, also the population ratios eventually leaned towards the Anglos and it was counter-productive to the British goal of integration.

There's also the problems of different wants: Roman Catholics Francophones, Industry heavy protestant Ontario, Resource and fishing based economies in the Atlantic, resource and agriculture heavy prairies and forestry heavy British Columbia.

There's just too many divergent goals, also there's the formation of Canada: a lot of which involved concessions to provinces for joining and to stay Canadian in the face of American encroachment.
 
As mentioned before, you had periods where Canada (under its different incarnations) operate with a 2 parties system of liberal/conservative (called literally "Red Party" and "Blue Party" in Lower Canada incidently).

As Canada became a bigger entity however you started to have regional demands that smaller parties or independents managed to fulfil better so if you want to have 2 parties, It's probably the system mechanism that need to be changed, making it harder (though not impossible) for a new party to register and maintain a party (higher number of supporters, larger deposit, no reimbursement of spendings) for example. If the government needed a double majority, it might also encourage voting only for a major party as someone winning with a minority of votes would automatically mean a new election.

Having parties following strictly linguistic lines would be unfeasible but historicaly, they sometime followed religious one so that you might have the early 20th century "Party A" being the preferred one of the canadiens and irish and "Party B" favoured by the English and scots with jewish, immigrants being the swing vote.
 
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