Progressive Conservative - New Democratic Merger possible?

With a PoD post-1969 (so the NDP is already established as a party) is there any way for the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats to have merged into a single opposition party to the Liberals rather than the PCs and Reform?

I was thinking of this as more of a Unite the Center rather than Unite the Right situation. Bonus points if both parties’ spirits live in rather than one swallowing up the other (as Reform did to the PCs).
 
The Canadian political spectrum at the time...

NDP Liberals PC Socred

How would your proposal be Unite The Center? It's more unite the moderate right, with the far left.

Anyway, I think it's pretty much ASB. Though if the PCs had continued with their Diefish posture of being anti-American and pro-British, with the Liberals continuing with the pro-US foreign policy they were advocating in the early 60s, AND if the NDP stops caring about social issues, and is willing to settle for moderate crown ownership in lieu of socialism(which is basically all they're advocating these days OTL), it might work.

But that's a lot of major ifs, and you'd probably still need foreign-policy to become the major issue, towering over everything else.
 
Last edited:
Imagine an alternate Cold War that is the US versus the UK, with Canada as a major flashploint. That could get you an alliance of socialists and old-school Tories opposing American influence in Canada, with the Liberals advocating a concilliatory Finlandization policy.

But we're basically talking about a world where the Yanks and the Brits have missiles pointed at each others' territory. Not just OTL where citizens of the Commonwealth grumbling about "zed not zee" is what passes for anglospheric fratricide.
 
I did a list on this the other day, although I had a much earlier PoD in 1930. I don't see how you get there post-1969 without an outlandish scenario that forces PCs and NDP to merge out of desperation and necessity. Like… if not overoceans' proposals, then at least something along the lines of the Liberals performing Mulroney '84 levels of dominance, for decades, and good luck with that…

Also, sorry, but "Unite the Center" doesn't make sense. The two parties' ideology clearly places them on opposite ends of the left-right spectrum, but even if that weren't enough, the Liberals clearly divide them— one opposes the Liberals from the right, the other from the left. But more importantly, the driving force of "Unite the Right" was that the right saw themselves as disunited. The PCs and NDP clearly do not see themselves as part of the same tradition, unfairly cleaved in two by politics, so there's never going to be any drive to unite the two.
 
If the Conservative's brief experiment with Social Democracy had lasted longer than a few years in the mid-1930s and the Liberals remained a Classical Liberal party, then it's feasible the Christian Socialist branch of the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation might have pushed to join up with the Conservatives after the Second World War, but it's politically impossible to have the NDP join the Conservatives post-1969.
 
Post 1969, it would be impossible to merge the PCs and the NDP. It would be political suicide for both Stanfield and it would be even worse for the NDP. If it's Douglas that pursues the merger, it would contradict everything since he was the one of several people that founded the NDP. Same goes for Lewis as he was one of the key people as well.
 
Post 1969, it would be impossible to merge the PCs and the NDP. It would be political suicide for both Stanfield and it would be even worse for the NDP. If it's Douglas that pursues the merger, it would contradict everything since he was the one of several people that founded the NDP. Same goes for Lewis as he was one of the key people as well.
pre 1969 tho?
 
pre 1969 tho?

Not a chance. The NDP which before 1961 didn't exist was the successor to the CCF which was founded in 1932 by progressives, farmers and labour unions and socialists. The PCs would reject such a merger instantly as it would be political suicide if a PC leader like Diefenbaker tried to merge with the CCF. For the CCF it would've been a betrayal of it's values. Add to the fact that both party memberships would've been furious if any type of merger was pursued.
 
pre 1969 tho?

Probably not, but old style conservatism and rural socialism had more in common in terms of policy sympathies than anything since...

I mean we do want a big tent, but this would be ridiculous.

OTOH I've spent a lot of time in the party working with a guy who would always say something to the effect that "at least you always know what bastardly thing a tory's gonna do" while cursing out the Liberals.
 
I think there is a path for this to happen pre-1969, along the lines of what @The Lethargic Lett suggested, and what I went with in my list, but it requires a very specific series of events starting in the 30s and 40s. It requires the Tories to fully embrace, rather than merely flirt with, social democracy, for the Liberals to stubbornly stay true to their classical liberal direction, and for them to stay on these paths. It's the latter point that I think is hardest; even though Tory socialism and classical liberalism are real ideologies, the fact remains that the parties have their own histories and traditions; the Conservatives represented established power structures, while the Liberals had a reformist streak to them, and it's going to be tough to have them each do a 180; I mean, it's those exact histories that lead to the LPC bending towards the reformist left while the Tories ultimately marginalized their Red wing in the 80s.

In my list (I swear I'm not trying to shamelessly plug myself here), I started with the twin ideas of 1) WLMK winning in 1930, and taking a very cautious approach to the Great Depression and 2) H. H. Stevens (who IOTL bolted from the Tories to start his own economicaly-intervenionist Reconstruction Party) challenging and winning the Conservative leadership from Bennett (as almost happened IOTL), then taking it down the economically-interventionist route he preferred. Other things you'd probably need to do is a more thorough embrace of the farmers' movement (but not Bracken, who was small-c conservative and Liberal-aligned), and marginalizing figures who used "red scare" rhetoric (such as George Drew). On the CCF side, a stronger/longer lasting influence of the social gospel would likely help, too. Then… after a few decades of this, and some electoral pragmatism (a dominant Liberal Party?)… you can get your merger. But only then.
 
Top