Continuing on my exploration of Canadian provincial politics, I’ve made province-by-province graphs tracking vote share (the line charts) and seat share (the stacked bar charts).
Only parties that have won government are included. Various “Progressive” and “United Farmers” groups are grouped together under a bright lime green.
I intend to eventually do the Atlantic provinces. There, in terms of party politics, the Liberals and (Progressive) Conservatives have consistently been the top two parties, with the exception of the Nova Scotia NDP, which was opposition and then government between 1998-2013, and the PEI Greens, who were the opposition between 2019 and 2023.
The rest of the piece looks at the four Western provinces in particular.
The Parties in the West
Curiously enough, in all four provinces, the Liberals spent the early 20th century in pole position, more likely to form government than any other party. The four provinces’ political paths then diverged quickly, which I try to summarize in this table:
Even though the Conservatives at the federal level have been the vehicle for Western representation/grievance for decades, initially they fared poorly provincially. In BC and Manitoba, they formed government a few times, but would settle into a secondary position behind the Liberals and became their junior coalition partner in the 1940s. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, the new provinces that were established by Laurier’s Liberal government, the Conservatives quite simply didn’t take root at the beginning — it took until the 1970s for them to become major players.
In the first third-party wave in the 1920s, various groups of farmers took power in Manitoba and Alberta — the United Farmers in the 1921 Alberta election, and the Progressives in the 1922 Manitoba election. In Manitoba, the Liberals responded by merging into the Progressives (in opposition to the Conservatives, then in power federally) and becoming the “Liberal-Progressives” in 1932, although they apparently came to be known informally as the Liberals (due to their staying power at the federal level) soon enough. In Alberta, the United Farmers faced feeble opposition until they were swept away by Social Credit along with the Liberals.
In the other two provinces (BC and Saskatchewan), the Liberals were challenged a decade later, by the CCF. The CCF was founded in 1932, then in 1933 came second in the BC popular vote (with 32%), then in 1934 became the only opposition in Saskatchewan’s legislature. The CCF then formed Saskatchewan’s government in 1944. Interestingly, in these two “socialist-first” provinces (i.e. where the CCF were the first successful “anti-establishment” force), they became very strongly entrenched: in Saskatchewan, between 1944 and 2003, the party fell below 40% of the vote only twice (and even then only slightly), while in BC, after its initial surge, it stayed between 28% to 38% for 35 years, then between 39% and 46% for 45 years (with one exception). This strong base does not mean they necessarily formed government — the BC NDP were nearly constantly in the opposition through 1990 — but it meant they never faced the risk of slipping into third-party status. In no other province have they been so consistently strong. And with the CCF/NDP so solidly anchored on the left, all other parties had to contest elections on the right — be it Liberals, Conservatives, or Social Credit. In recent years, the BC NDP has soared above its historic share of the vote, while the bottom has fallen out of the Saskatchewan party’s support.
Returning to the “farmer-first” provinces of Alberta and Manitoba: Manitoba’s Liberals seemed to have skated through the populist challenges unscathed, having absorbed the Progressives under their banner, then led an all-party coalition government during the war (one that even included the CCF — contrasting it with BC’s Liberal-Conservative coalition, which was more explicitly an anti-CCF ploy). In its 1953 victory, it was 23 points clear of any opposition party. This came crashing down quickly: in 1958, the PCs surged 19 points to form government, then the NDP did the same in 1969, jumping 15 points to leapfrog the Liberals and take first place. The PCs and NDP have alternated in first and second place since them, with one exception — in 1988, when the collapse of the NDP government saw them lose 18 points and be brought to third place, overtaken by the Liberals, although this proved to be brief.
Alberta’s Liberals never had much of a chance after the end of its initial period in government: what the graph above shows as a Liberal surge in 1940 was actually the “Unity Movement”, when the various opposition parties united to stand a single candidate per riding against Social Credit (in vain). The only true Liberal chance was in 1993, when it came within four points of defeating the PC government — indeed, polls had it leading at one point, forcing the PCs to ditch Don Getty in favour of Ralph Klein. That window of opportunity closed, and when the next one opened in 2015, the Liberals were caught unawares, and the NDP became the main non-Conservative vehicle instead.
Rises and Falls
What are some common threads here? First, two-partyism is the norm—the usual Liberal trick of “coming up the middle” in a three-party race doesn’t work in the West, so the Liberals have to take a side. On the one hand, this is simply how politics works in the rest of the Anglosphere, but on the other hand, federal politics in BC and Manitoba is very much a three-party affair, so it’s not clear why provincial politics couldn’t be the same.
A second point: winning an election generally wins you a place in the party system for a few decades, even if the party came from nowhere. Consider how BC Social Credit’s initial victory seemed almost accidental, or how the Manitoba NDP had never formed government and languished around 20% for 15 years before surging to victory in 1963, or how the Alberta NDP shot up from fourth place to majority government in 2015.
But second-place parties get no such guarantees and remain vulnerable to losing their position. Consider that Liberal parties in all four provinces rose become the Official Opposition in recent decades: Manitoba in 1988 under Sharon Carstairs, BC in 1991 under Gordon Wilson, Alberta in 1993 under Laurence Decore, and Saskatchewan in 1995 under Lynda Haverstock. Only one, the BC Liberals, ever ended up forming government, while two (Manitoba and Saskatchewan) immediately slipped back into minor-party status. This, despite the superficial similarities between the BC and Saskatchewan cases: a party that took advantage of the complete collapse of a governing right-wing party. But the Saskatchewan PCs’ rebranding as the Saskatchewan Party was successful and it immediately overtook the Liberals, while BC Social Credit’s rebranding as the Reform Party fizzled out, allowing the Liberals the space to remain the main non-NDP party.
What might this glimpse at history forecast for, say, the Ontario Liberals? They are fortunate that the NDP did not make it into government, as that might have been enough to make them the default centre-left option (although its previous stint in government proved to be short-lived and remains a net negative for their party image). The closest analogue for the Ontario Liberals might be the Manitoba NDP in 1988: a governing party collapses at the end of their term, allowing a historically minor party to gain Official Opposition status but whose momentum stalls. The Manitoba NDP, however, made it back to Official Opposition after one election, an achievement that has eluded the Ontario Liberals so far.
A Blueprint for Rebuilding
If the Liberal opposition in the 80s saw a brief reflourishing of Western Liberalism, the opposition period under Harper was much less fruitful. In 2007, although the Saskatchewan NDP was widely expected to lose power (and did), the disgruntled electorate did not particularly notice the Liberals. Similarly, the Manitoba NDP had no chance of re-election in 2016, and here, Trudeau’s victory the previous fall gave the provincial Liberals a polling boost, putting them within a few points of first place. It was not to be, as they quickly sank back to their habitual third. Finally, Alberta’s PC dynasty came to a close in 2015, but anti-PC votes ended up stampeding to the NDP.
Any future prospects for Western Liberals would likely require the federal party to be defeated first, given the historic trend of federal-provincial balancing (see my earlier post). Provincial parties need the space to rebrand on their own terms, like with the BC Liberals in 1991, or when Alberta’s Liberals attacked the governing PCs from the right in an informal alliance with federal Reform Party activists in 1993. This pattern also holds when looking at provincial Conservatives: the Alberta and Saskatchewan parties rose to power during their federal cousins’ long spell in opposition to Pierre Trudeau, while the Manitoba Conservatives won during the Conservative Diefenbaker’s initial honeymoon period.
Any such revival is most likely to occur either in BC, where federal Liberals came first in seats in 2021, or Manitoba, where federal Liberals outpolled the NDP. BC’s NDP government has a reasonable chance of following the historical pattern of being elected to four terms, then facing a calamitous wipeout at the end that might see a lot of voters shopping around for a new option. That would be around 2032, when the federal Liberals are likely to be out of power. (However, the “BC Liberal” brand will only become free to use again in 2033, ten years after the now-BC United stopped using it.)
The same trick likely won’t work in Manitoba, which is in the wrong part of its political cycle: currently the seventh year of a PC government (one that may yet be re-elected, although it is the less likely outcome). The Liberals’ better (if still unlikely) bet here is for an eventual federal Conservative government to be so hideously unpopular that it pushes their provincial counterparts into third place and leaves their voters looking for new options (like Mulroney did in Ontario).
And then there are Alberta and Saskatchewan, the heartland of Conservative self-identity and the other side of the country’s “carbon divide”, where federal Liberals placed third in most urban ridings and fourth in most rural ones. Even a Liberal brand that is no longer defined by Justin Trudeau has no future here. The only hope here is to note that weirder things have happened — the Progressive Conservatives was an Ontario-focused party with no real durable base in the West until John Diefenbaker, for a decade the party’s only Saskatchewan MP, swept the region.
That said, there is probably potential in both provinces for an option that is ideologically in between their current governing Conservatives and the opposition NDP – just not one that calls itself the Liberals. This raises a broader question about whether it’s worth it for provincial parties to affiliate with federal parties at all, or if they shouldn’t all do what the Saskatchewan Party did and brand themselves on their own terms. That question will be explored in a later piece.
The original spreadsheet with provincial election data that made the graphs is here:
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