WI Conservatives lose in Canada 1979

What if the canadian federal election in 1979 doesn't bring the conservatives to power? Would a couple more wins for the Liberals manage this, such that a Lib-NDP coalition would just manage to get a majority?

One small thing I do wonder -- would this be enough to preserve the "Mincome" experiment being performed outside of Winnipeg?
 
It’s likely that there’s not a coalition, the word is hated in the country (look at 2008). The real question is if there’s a majority or minority government.
 
Wasn't PM Joe Clark 1979-80 a progressive conservative?
Indeed he was.

Anyway, regarding the topic of this post, if the Liberals win in 1979 with a majority, everything is almost almost identical to OTL. The constitution is still patriated, the National Energy Program still happens, Mulroney still becomes PC leader, Trudeau still resigns, Turner still wins the ensuing leadership race, and the PCs still win the next election in a landslide, and everything after is also identical.

If it's a minority, it's hard to tell what happens, but with the NDP having strength in the west, and the NEP being so unpopular there, it's not impossible the NDP refuses to support the NEP. Trudeau at this point can either accept this or call an election seeking to win a majority in the East.
 
Indeed he was.

Anyway, regarding the topic of this post, if the Liberals win in 1979 with a majority, everything is almost almost identical to OTL. The constitution is still patriated, the National Energy Program still happens, Mulroney still becomes PC leader, Trudeau still resigns, Turner still wins the ensuing leadership race, and the PCs still win the next election in a landslide, and everything after is also identical.

If it's a minority, it's hard to tell what happens, but with the NDP having strength in the west, and the NEP being so unpopular there, it's not impossible the NDP refuses to support the NEP. Trudeau at this point can either accept this or call an election seeking to win a majority in the East.
Clark would stay on as leader for the next election, and Trudeau is likely to retire earlier (making possibly MacEachen, Macdonald, or someone else leader instead).
 
Wasn't PM Joe Clark 1979-80 a progressive conservative?
All PMs from Diefenbaker to Campbell were Progressive Conservatives. Before then, the party went by different names. The modern Conservative Party has more elements of the Western Reform Party than the Eastern Red Tories.
 
Clark would stay on as leader for the next election, and Trudeau is likely to retire earlier (making possibly MacEachen, Macdonald, or someone else leader instead).
Clark also stayed on for the next election in OTL. The reason Mulroney became leader was because of the high levels of discontent within the PC party led Clark to call a leadership election in 1983 to assert his authority, but he would lose this election to Mulroney. With Clark not even having won a single election in this scenario, I imagine there would be even more discontent, and hence I imagine he would still call a leadership election.

Also, Perhaps I'm missing something, I don't see why Trudeau would be likely to retire earlier.
 
Just realized, where Mincome is concerned, I was confusing the 1979 Federal Election with the 1977 Manitoba Election; my bad.

On that subject though -- looking over the returns for that local election, and there were six seats where the Progressive Conservative candidate beat the New Democrat by less than 500 votes; if just those races had gone the other way, the social experiment going on in Dauphin would continue for a little longer, and might actually manage to get some findings published before the tories cut their funding.
 
Clark also stayed on for the next election in OTL. The reason Mulroney became leader was because of the high levels of discontent within the PC party led Clark to call a leadership election in 1983 to assert his authority, but he would lose this election to Mulroney. With Clark not even having won a single election in this scenario, I imagine there would be even more discontent, and hence I imagine he would still call a leadership election.

Also, Perhaps I'm missing something, I don't see why Trudeau would be likely to retire earlier.
A loss of power is even worse than not winning, and the Tories were disappointed at the campaign style of Clark. Typically, Canadian party leaders last almost a decade.

With an earlier election than IOTL, Trudeau would step down earlier.
 
Wasn't PM Joe Clark 1979-80 a progressive conservative?

Just to be clear, Progressive Conservative was just the name of the party, not neccessarily a description of the ideology of any particular member. As a party, they were more-or-less like the UK Conservatives(basically a coalition of Red Tories, Empire nostalgists, and pro-business types), though a little milder in their embrace of Thatcherism under Mulroney(who, did, though, idolize Ronald Reagan pretty openly).

I believe the party added "progressive" to their name when they elected the former Progressive John Bracken as their leader in the 1940s. But his version of "progressivism" was agrarian in nature, which at times went in for social conservativism. But nowadays, when people lament the absence of "progressive" Conservatives, they mean something more like neo-liberal economic wonks who march in Pride parades(which they then proceed to defund, along with the entire budget for parades and everything else). My own province of Alberta was governed for many years by a guy named Ralph Klein, who practiced slash-and-burn economics, along with somewhat reluctant but still significant pandering to the Bible Belt on social issues. This was all done under the "Progessive Conservative" banner.

TLDR: Despite its name, the Progressive Conservative Party was pretty much just a standard right-wing party.
 
^ FWIW, though, Clark himself WAS identified as being from the Red Tory wing of the party, though that was not true of everyone in his caucus. And even Clark had brainstorms like moving the Canadian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a notion not now associated with the most enlightened political thinkers.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
And for the rough American counterpart, see the reference to "Rockefeller Republican" at the bottom.
Well, I actually think that "Nixonian Republicans" would fit the case better, since Rockefeller/Dewey/LaFollette Jr/Stassen were Northeastern/Midwest liberals.
 
Well, I actually think that "Nixonian Republicans" would fit the case better, since Rockefeller/Dewey/LaFollette Jr/Stassen were Northeastern/Midwest liberals.

But how does region relate to the ideological divide? Red Tories in Canada tended to be people who favoured a somewhat paternalistic notion of a welfare state, combined with certain modest interventions into the economy. For the post war period to about the 1980s, they could probably just have been described as that section of the PC party most amenable to the Keynesian consensus. Whichever GOP faction fits that desciption best would be the closest US counterpart, whichever region they happen to come from.
 
Last edited:
. . . to about the 1980s, they could probably just have been described as that section of the PC party most amenable to the Keynesian consensus. . .
I know it's conventional wisdom that the Keynesian consensus was "refuted" around 1980, but . . .

P&B%2026.11%20Decrease%20Aggregate%20Supply.jpg

Stagflation

The supply curve shifts inward and you end up with both higher prices and less GDP. There's no great mystery.

Maybe it media types and politicos deciding ahead of time that they're not going to understand a mathy subject.

-------

PS The early '70s had a weirder type of stagflation. But the stagflation following the oil shocks of '73 and '79 is straightforward and direct (as much as anything can be in complex system).
 

Thomas1195

Banned
But how does region relate to the ideological divide? Red Tories in Canada tended to be people who favoured a somewhat paternalistic notion of a welfare state, combined with certain modest interventions into the economy
So did Nixon (and, you know, many Dixiecrats). But the Rockefeller wing was more socially liberal than Nixon/Eisenhower. Rockefeller Republicans, IMO, were more similar to UK Orange Book Liberal Democrats. They were essentially modified classical liberals who accepted state intervention.

Whichever GOP faction fits that desciption best would be the closest US counterpart, whichever region they happen to come from.
Or Southern Democrats barring their crazed racism.

The key is social conservatism.

Also, regions did matter, because heavily urbanized economic and industrial centres tend to vote liberal/socialist. The problem was that socialist parties were never strong in US and Canada.
 
The key is social conservatism.

Well, just to clarify, I THINK I used the phrase "social conservativism" to describe the agrarian populists like John Bracken, not to describe Red Tories per se. The word "progressive" entered the party's nomenclature because of Bracken, but has not since then continued to describe, neccessarily, the views of people called Red Tories, except in the sense that "progressive" is used to mean "left wing" in countless other contexts.

It is true that old-style Red Tories like Diefenbaker and his academic apologist George Grant took a dim view of social liberalism, opposing things like the legalization of homosexuality and abortion. By the time I was paying attention to politics in the early 80s, however, Red Tory basically meant "left-leaning Tory", and "left-leaning" usually included social liberalism. John Crosbie had been regarded as a left-leaning Tory from way back, and when he as Justice Minister in the 1980s implemented human-rights protection for gays, this was attributed by some to his being a "Red Tory", even though the earlier generation of Red Tories(eg. Diefenbaker and Grant) would have been appalled.

So yeah, in its original usage, "Red Tory" would probably be closer to people like New Deal Dixecrats, minus the racism(and yes, Dief's support was more rural than urban). In the Clark and Mulroney eras, it might have included people who were both economically and socially left-leaning, so closer to Rockefeller Republicans. Nowadays, it basically means "economically neo-liberal, socially liberal".
 
Top