Why did Canada’s national Conservative Party once have the paradoxical name of “Progressive Conservative,” as do most provincial Tory parties to this day?
The short answer is: Western farmers. A longer answer is: the old Progressive Party and a political outsider named John Bracken, plus a certain serial Conservative misfortune at the ballot box.
In the early 1940s, Tories were officially called the Liberal-Conservative Party, a name inherited on and off from the early 1850s.
John Bracken insisted on the name change in 1942 as a condition for agreeing to serve as the national Conservative leader, which he did from 1943 to 1948. Before that he had served as the premier of Manitoba since 1922, when the Progressive Party of Manitoba had won a surprise election victory without even having a leader in place.
Awakened by the telephone in the wee hours of election night, Bracken was described by one historian as “the sleepy principal of the Agricultural College.” Sometimes it pays to answer the phone. He was sworn in as premier on Aug. 8, taking his seat in an Oct. 5 byelection, and went on to win four more elections under the Progressive and Liberal-Progressive banner.
After Bennett, the next Conservative leader from 1938 to 1940 was Robert Manion, a First World War veteran. He began rebuilding the old coalition with Quebec nationalists. By declaring support for Britain (now in a state of war with the Hitler-Stalin Alliance of 1939) while also opposing conscription, Manion got Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis on board. But with the war on, the natural non-Liberal alliance proved elusive. In 1939, Duplessis was defeated in the provincial election, followed by Manion in the 1940 Dominion election.
Meighen then failed to get a seat in the House of Commons in a 1942 byelection in which the Liberals and the leftist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), ancestor of the NDP, cooperated to block him.
“It was my firm conviction,” Meighen wrote later, “that there would be very considerable advantage, both to the Conservative Party and to the country, in having a Leader who was so closely and prominently associated with Agriculture as was Mr. Bracken. To my mind at that time, as now, the appeal of the Conservative Party should be more and more directed toward Canadian farmers and primary producers generally. Their true and obvious interests were in line with Conservative traditions and were definitely out of harmony with radical and socialistic thinking.”
About the same time, the Conservative Party held a policy conference on the Trinity College School campus at Port Hope, not far from Toronto, to address the emerging threat from CCF and set the Conservatives on a new footing.
They endorsed not only agricultural credits and free trade (favoured by farmers) but also took up deeply unconservative and economically illiterate policies such as “full employment,” compulsory collective bargaining for trade unions, old age government pensions at a younger age, subsidized housing, and medicare—all of which encouraged the entrenchment in Canada of a confidence trick that socialist ideas could work in the long run, rather than be a slowly ticking time bomb.
Meighen was against socialist policies, but he believed “the spirit of Port Hope” would help recruit John Bracken. “The CCF is a menace to the country,” he wrote. “It has all the fakes and fanatics now within its compass” and deserved to be defeated. “The result puts the Conservative Party back on the map,” he wrote as the provincial Ontario Conservatives, under First World War veteran George Drew, were elected for the first time in a decade and, Meighen added, portended “the ultimate extinction of the Liberal party as a major force.”
That prediction proved premature, and not for the last time either. In the Dominion election of June 11, 1945, the King Liberals did lose 61 seats but held a reduced majority.
Bracken’s Progressive Conservatives gained 28 seats for a total of 67—more than they had held since 1930. The CCF also gained 20. Unfortunately, 49 of the Conservatives’ seats were in Ontario and only five in the Prairies, where the party had expected a Manitoba leader would make big gains for them. He got only one-quarter of the popular vote.
The name of “Progressive” Conservative stuck until Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay did away with it in their agreement of Oct. 16, 2003, creating the Conservative Party of Canada—though the “Progressive” moniker lives on in the provincial parties of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the four Atlantic provinces.
