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The Electoral System and the Party System in Canada, 1921–1965*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Alan C. Cairns
Alan C. Cairns
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 55 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1968

References

1 Schattschneider, E. E., Party Government (New York, 1942), 62, 70Google Scholar; Lipset, S. M., “Party Systems and the Representation of Social Groups,” European Journal of Sociology, I (1960), 61–3, 80Google Scholar; Duverger, M., Political Parties (London, 1965)Google Scholar, Book II; Duverger, M., “The Influence of the Electoral System on Political Life,” International Social Science Bulletin, 3 (Summer, 1951)Google Scholar; Key, V. O., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York, 1961)Google Scholar, chap. 5. See also Degrazia, A., “General Theory of Apportionment,” Law and Contemporary Problems, XVII (1952)Google Scholar, and Rustow, D. A., “Some Observations on Proportional Representation,” Journal of Politics, XII (1950).Google ScholarHermens, F. A., Democracy or Anarchy? (Notre Dame, 1941)Google Scholar and Lakeman, Enid and Lambert, J. D., Voting in Democracies (London, 1955)Google Scholar discuss proportional representation from opposed viewpoints.

2 “We English-speaking peoples,” stated Sir Cartwright, Richard, “have made a sort of fetish of our present system, and appear to think that if you will only cut up a country or a province into equal divisions and give every man, wise or ignorant, rich or poor, the right to vote, you have devised a machine which will give you automatically a perfect representation. This is a huge mistake.” Reminiscences (Toronto, 1912), 314.Google Scholar See also Underhill, F. H., “Canadian Liberal Democracy in 1955,” in Ferguson, G. V. and Underhill, F. H., Press and Party in Canada (Toronto, 1955), 41–3.Google Scholar

3 Smiley, D. V., “The Two-Party System and One-Party Dominance in the Liberal Democratic, State,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXIV (1958)., 316–17Google Scholar, discusses the effects of the electoral system on major and minor parties. Schattschneider, Party Government, 74–5, and Herring, Pendleton, The Politics of Democracy (New York, 1940), 182–3Google Scholar note that the most important third parties in the United States have been sectional.

4 There is an unavoidable problem of circular reasoning here. There is an important difference between saying that the electoral system favours parties which are sectional and saying that the electoral system encourages parties to be sectional.

5 If 1958 is excluded as a deviant case the contrast is even more glaring, 727 Liberals from Quebec confronted 85 Conservatives, a ratio of 8.6 to 1, in contrast to the ratio of 2.1 to 1 which existed at the level of the voter.

6 Brady, A., Canada (London, 1932), 13–14Google Scholar; Siegfried, A., The Race Question in Canada (Toronto, 1966), 114.Google Scholar

7 McLeod is undoubtedly correct in his suggestion that national unity would be served if Canadians were “divided across ethnic barriers on lines of support for competing policies,” but he fails to note the barrier which the electoral system has placed, at least historically, in the way of this objective. McLeod, J. T., “Party Structure and Party Reform,” in Rotstein, A., ed., The Prospect of Change (Toronto, 1965), 18–19.Google Scholar

8 Clokie, H. McD., Canadian Government and Politics (Toronto, 1944), 81–3Google Scholar; McLeod, “Party Structure and Party Reform,” 4–5, 9, 14; Brady, Canada, 102–3; Brady, A., Democracy in the Dominions (Toronto, 2nd ed., 1952), 110–12Google Scholar; Dawson, R. M., The Government of Canada (Toronto, 4th ed., 1963)Google Scholar, rev. by N. Ward, 469–70; Cony, J. A. and Hodgetts, J. E., Democratic Government and Politics (Toronto, 3rd ed., 1963)Google Scholar, chaps. VIII-IX; Beck, J. M. and Dooley, D. J., “Party Images in Canada,” Queen's Quarterly, LXVII (1960), 433Google Scholar; Underhill, F. H., Canadian Political Parties (Ottawa, 1957), 4–5.Google Scholar For a critical discussion of brokerage politics see Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto, 1965), 373–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The confusion over what the parties actually do is of long standing. Siegfried observed that Canadian statesmen “seem to fear great movements of opinion, and they devote them-selves to weakening such movements…. Let a question of race or religion be raised, and… the elections will become struggles of political principle, sincere and passionate. Now this is exactly what is feared by the prudent and far-sighted men who have been given the responsibility of maintaining the national equilibrium.” Less frequently quoted is the directly contrary statement that “The appeal to racial exclusiveness combined with religious bigotry is the first and last cartridge of the politicians of the Dominion. Before thinking of any other reason, or after all other reasons have been exhausted, they come to or return to this.” Siegfried, Race Question, 113, 130. A similar contradiction is implicit in Robert Alford's statement: “Although the major parties are not distinctly Left and Right in their policies and appeals, they have, by that very token, been an integrating force in Canadian society, since they emphasize regional, religious, and ethnic representation and compromises rather than either universalistic or class representation.” Party and Society (Chicago, 1963), 260; emphasis added.

10 Pierre Elliott Trudeau observes that French-Canadian Liberals have encouraged their potential supporters to use “their voting bloc as an instrument of racial defence, or of personal gain. Their only slogans have been racial slogans.” “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXIV, 3 (Aug. 1958), reprinted in Wade, Mason, ed., Canadian Dualism (Toronto, 1960), 256.Google Scholar

11 Graham, Roger, Arthur Meighen: And Fortune Fled (Toronto, 1963), 340.Google Scholar See also Graham, , “Arthur Meighen and the Conservative Party in Quebec: The Election of 1925,” Canadian Historical Review, XXXVI (1955)Google Scholar, for an analysis of this election in Quebec. For appeals to racial passions in 1921 and 1925 see Graham, Meighen: And Fortune Fled, 140–3, 340–3, and Neatby, Blair, Mackenzie King 1924–1932: The Lonely Heights (Toronto, 1963), 73.Google Scholar

12 The impact of the conscription issue on party strategy and voter choice in Quebec is discussed in Ward, N., ed., A Party Politician: The Memoirs of Chubby Power (Toronto, 1966).Google Scholar Power suggests that with the exceptions of 1926, 1930, and 1935 it was an issue in every election from 1911 to 1940 inclusive.

13 Meisel, John, The Canadian General Election of 1957 (Toronto, 1962), 167–8.Google Scholar

14 This induced Le Devoir to observe “sombrely that the composition of the new Cabinet reduced Quebec ‘to the status of a second-class, nearly a third-class province.’ Neither the Conservative nor the Liberal parties, it argued, can rule without the support of at least twenty-five French Canadians in the House. ‘And it is in the interest of the French-language group to be strongly represented in every government, whatever may be its party name; for every time that group has lacked an influential representation, French Canadians have been subjected to grave injustices.’” Mallory, J. R., “The Election and the Constitution,” Queen's Quarterly, LXIV (1957), 481.Google Scholar

15 Wrong, D. H., “Parties and Voting in Canada,” Political Science Quarterly, LXXIII (1958), 403.Google Scholar

16 Beck, J. M., “Quebec and the Canadian Elections of 1958,” Parliamentary Affairs, XII (1958–59), 95–6.Google Scholar Siegfried, Race Question, 163–4, 207–8 provides examples of the importance of French-English cleavages on election results and on party appeals at the turn of the century. As late as 1962, in some parts of Quebec, the Liberals tried to “link Diefenbaker with the historic ‘Tory enemies’ of French Canada. The names Borden, Meighen, Bennett, and Drew are still spat out as epithets by Liberal orators on the hustings.” Regenstreif, P., “The Liberal Party of Canada: A Political Analysis,” PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1963, 477.Google Scholar

17 By the 1963 election the politics of sectionalism once more reduced the Conservatives to a token effort in Quebec, “largely directed to holding the few seats they had. The Prime Minister himself did little more than show the flag….” Saywell, John, ed., Canadian Annual Review for 1963 (Toronto, 1964), 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In the 1965 campaign the major parties exchanged sectional insults, with the Liberals charging that the Conservatives did not have and would not gain meaningful representation in Quebec, to which the Conservatives retorted that the Liberals would lack representation elsewhere. Saywell, John, ed., Canadian Annual Review for 1965 (Toronto, 1966), 85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Meisel, John, “The Stalled Omnibus: Canadian Parties in the 1960s,” Social Research, 30 (1963), 383–4.Google Scholar

19 Lipson, Leslie, “Party Systems in the United Kingdom and the Older Commonwealth: Causes, Resemblances, and Variations,” Political Studies, VII (1959), 27–8.Google Scholar See Ward, A Party Politician, 389, 392 for Power's recognition of the importance of Quebec to the Liberals.

20 N. Ward, “The National Political Scene,” in Wade, ed., Canadian Dualism, 266, 272.

21 Sir Richard Cartwright argued in his Reminiscences, 352, that because the provinces differ in wealth and interests, “the temptation to the poorer provinces to sell themselves to the party in office is always very great and is certain to be traded on by practical politicians on both sides.”

Graham, Meighen: And Fortune Fled, 299, 303, describes the pressures on Meighen to devise an attractive western policy as otherwise his party “has not the ghost of a chance on the prairies in an election.” In contrast to King's assiduous courting of the prairie provinces, waffling on the tariff and promises of special western policies, Meighen decided to preach the tariff to the unconverted. He was rewarded with ten seats and King with twenty in 1925.

Liberal courting of British Columbia in 1925 by reducing rates on flour and grain going to Pacific ports for export is noted in Sharp, Walter R., “The Canadian Elections of 1925,” American Political Science Review, XX (1926), 111Google Scholar n. 3. Laing, Lionel H., “The Pattern of Canadian Politics: The Elections of 1945,” American Political Science Review, XL (1946)Google Scholar provides a sectional interpretation of the 1945 election in terms of results and to a lesser extent of strategy.

22 Scarrow, H. A., “Distinguishing between Political Parties—The Case of Canada,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, IX (1965), 72.Google Scholar He also notes (75–6n) the tendency of a candidate to appeal for support “on the ground that only his party has a chance of winning office, and that consequently the voters of the district or region had better jump on the winning bandwagon if they want to be represented in the cabinet. Diefenbaker made wide use of this appeal in Quebec in 1958.” Paul Hellyer appealed to prairie voters for Liberal support in the 1965 federal election to “elect more members to the Government side to make sure the views of this area are considered.” Winnipeg Free Press, 29 Oct. 1965.

23 The CCF seems to have been an exception. See Young, Walter D., “The National CCF: Political Party and Political Movement,” PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1965Google Scholar, for an analysis of the special role played by the central office, in effect by David Lewis, for long periods in the formation of policy and strategy.

24 The fact is that influence in caucus and party is conditioned by seniority. Ward, N., The Canadian House of Commons: Representation (Toronto, 2nd ed. 1963), 140–3Google Scholar, is relevant here with its implication that the spokesmen for the sectional strongholds of the party will enjoy a pre-eminent position compared to the more fluctuating representation where the party is weak.

25 “Distinguishing between Political Parties,” 69. See also Williams, John R., The Conservative Party of Canada: 1920–1949 (Durham, NC, 1956), 14–15Google Scholar, and Ward, “The National Political Scene,” 268–70, for related comments.

26 See the interesting analysis of the 1935 election by Escott Reid which asserted that the difference in ethnic composition of the Liberal and Conservative parliamentary parties would incline the Liberals to isolationism and the Conservatives to a more imperialistic policy. “The Canadian Election of 1935 and After,” American Political Science Review, 30 (1936), 117–18.

27 See Regenstreif, “Liberal Party,” 472–7, and Alford, Party and Society, 258, for party policy differences and party images related to French-English relations.

28 Other factors not considered here also influence party policy and attitudes. Meisel has cogently argued that the Liberals entered the 1957 federal election with a national approach remarkably insensitive to regional needs, an approach born of long and intimate contact with a centralist-oriented civil service and a lack of feedback from backbenchers in the Commons. By contrast, the Conservatives, who entered the election as an Ontario party in terms of existing parliamentary representation, proved remarkably sensitive to the needs of regions and groups neglected by the Liberals. Meisel, John, “The Formulation of Liberal and Conservative Programmes in the 1957 Canadian General Election,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXVI (1960).Google Scholar

29 In the mid-fifties Ward made the general point that all opposition parties had “little experience in dealing with French Canadians as trusted colleagues in caucus,” with a resultant development of traditions reflecting that fact. “The National Political Scene,” 267.

30 Conservative Party, 197–200.

31 Ibid., 197–8.

32 “The National Political Scene,” 269–70.

33 The history of the CCF reveals that the sectional backgrounds of party MPs did not orient the party in the direction of its western supporters. In fact, the party rapidly moved away from its agrarian stronghold and became, from the viewpoint of the national leaders, and especially David Lewis the most important person in the determination of party policy, a party with an urban, industrial, working class, and central Canada orientation. Young, “The National CCF,” 127–8, 131, 132, 139–40, 148–9, 159–60, 166, 200–1, 204, 249–50, 310.

34 “Of course,” he continued, “times and circumstances do arise where profound personal convictions conflict with party success or personal ambition, and where one must make decisions that one knows to be unpalatable to the voters.” Ward, A Party Politician, 318.

35 Schumpeter, J., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 3rd ed., 1962), 285.Google Scholar

36 Neatby, King: The Lonely Heights, 66–7. See also 222–4.

37 Dean, E. P. provides several striking examples in “How Canada Has Voted: 1867–1945,” Canadian Historical Review, XXX (1949).Google Scholar Duverger, who argued that “Parliamentary strength is always much more important than real strength in the country,” provides a British illustration of the way in which this perceptual bias operates: “The fact that the Labour party had obtained only 48.7% of the poll in 1945 was completely obliterated by the fact that it controlled 390 votes in the Commons; public opinion itself considered Labour as having a strong majority.” Political Parties, 400.

38 The provisions of Sections 51 and 51A of the BNA Act allocating parliamentary seats to provinces are important contributing factors in facilitating provincial or sectional interpretations of election results. As a byproduct the system precludes the possibility of electoral boundaries crossing provincial boundaries and makes the province a natural and easy unit for interpreting election results. In addition, of course, it transforms struggles over representation into struggles over provincial rights. I am indebted to Professor Walter Young for drawing these factors to my attention.

39 Hodgetts, J. E., “Regional Interests and Policy in a Federal Structure,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, XXXII (1966), 10.Google Scholar

40 Morton, W. L., The Kingdom of Canada (Toronto, 1963), 450Google Scholar; Cook, R.et al., Canada: A Modern Study (Toronto, 1963), 254Google Scholar; Neatby, King: The Lonely Heights, 74, and Underbill, “Canadian Liberal Democracy in 1955,” 40.

41 Underbill, F. H., The Image of Confederation (Toronto, 1964), 54.Google Scholar

42 McLeod, “Party Structure and Party Reform,” 10. He adds that this is not “peculiar to Quebec.”

43 Regenstreif, P., “The Canadian General Election of 1958,” Western Political Quarterly, XIII (1960), 362–3.Google Scholar See also Wrong, “Parties and Voting in Canada,” 403–4.

44 Thorburn, H. G., Politics in New Brunswick (Toronto, 1961), 176.Google Scholar New Brunswick, Thorburn argues, “has been on the winning side whenever this could be divined with any accuracy before the election” (183); see also 49.

45 The sections have been defined as Maritimes/Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Prairies, and British Columbia.

46 In 1925 and 1957 the Liberals and Conservatives respectively have been identified as winners for the purpose of the above calculation.

47 Schattschneider, Party Government, 111. This point is made by Clokie, Canadian Government and Politics, 87–9, in a discussion implying that class cleavages are more real than sectional cleavages.

48 Porter, Vertical Mosaic, 373–7; Underhill, F. H., In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto, 1960), 167.Google Scholar

49 Vertical Mosaic, 373–4.

50 Alford, Party and Society, 339; Porter, Vertical Mosaic, 368–9; V. O. Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy, 109; Key, , Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups (New York, 2nd ed., 1947), 152.Google Scholar

51 Political Parties, 383.

52 Lipset, S. M., Political Man (New York, 1963), 13.Google Scholar The extensive literature on cross-pressures is relevant here with its emphasis that multiple group membership and identification have “the effect of reducing the emotion in political choices.” Ibid.

53 Image of Confederation, 53—4.

54 For example, in recent articles Leon Epstein has specifically downgraded its importance, “A Comparative Study of Canadian Parties,” American Political Science Review, LVIII (1964), 48, 57–8, and McLeod, in an extensive catalogue of factors relevant to explaining the party system, does not discuss the electoral system, except for incidental mention of its contribution to single party dominance. McLeod, “Party Structure and Party Reform,” 9. The views of Lipson and Meisel are discussed in the following paragraphs.

Smiley is an exception in according some significance to the electoral system. He notes that the system favours sectionally based minor parties, and that it was “strategic” in destroying the Canadian two-party system between 1935 and 1953. “The Two-Party System and One-Party Dominance,” 316–17.

55 “Party Systems in the United Kingdom and the Older Commonwealth,” 20–1.

56 He supports his argument by noting that both the two-party system and its successor multi-party system existed within the same institutional framework. “The Stalled Omnibus,” 370.

57 Livingston, W. S., Federalism and Constitutional Change (Oxford, 1956), 7–9.Google Scholar

58 Alford, Party and Society, 42–9, discusses various factors sustaining sectionalism.

59 Scarrow, “Distinguishing between Political Parties,” and Meisel, John, “Recent Changes in Canadian Parties,” in Thorburn, Hugh G., ed., Party Politics in Canada (Scarborough, 2nd ed., 1967).Google Scholar

60 Lipset, “Party Systems and the Representation of Social Groups,” 76–7; Duverger, Political Parties, 382–4.