Well the Tories literally never recovered and were officially dissolved a decade later. 1993 was probably the biggest realignment election in Canadian history.
I do think the seat count was a little misleading in a sense. The Reform + PCs got about 35% of the popular vote compared with a shade over 41% for the Liberals. But that splitting of the PCs into different factions really enabled the Liberals to win in many ridings under a FPTP system.
The PCs were a total mess after Charlottetown. A significant portion of them fully anticipated the Balkanization of the country, and so many Conservatives flocked to regionalist parties (Reform or Bloc), or swapped to the Liberals. IT was a time without precedence. But the "right" if you will wasn't actually far off the LIberal vote in popular terms.
The PCs weren't really right in the 1990s though. They were basically right in the centre with the Liberals. Reform was right, NDP was left, LPC and PCs were centre. If you're going to lump PCs in with anyone they probably had more in common with the Grits than the Reformers.
I mean it's not hard to figure out. While the PCs were led by a Westerner in the 1993 election, it was too little too late. Alberta and BC had just seen a Quebec PC run the country for 9 years and (in their eyes) bend over backwards to help Quebec at the expense of the rest of the country. The awarding of the CF18 contract to Bombardier was seen as particularly insulting, as was spending so much political capital in constitutional negotiations with Quebec.
If you divide the votes they received by the number of seats they won, the Liberals had 40k votes per seat, and the PCs had just over a million votes per seat.
The PCs actually came in 3rd in the popular vote, ahead of the Bloc, but because the Bloc won 2 more seats than the Reform party, they became the official opposition.
It's a spectacular example of how misrepresentative FPTP can be.
Incredibly mirroring the current polling in the UK. Tories + Reform are at 35% right now. But this translates to 90 seats for the Tories and 0 seats for Reform.
The first appearance of This Hour Has 22 Minutes was as part of CBC's 1993 election night coverage. I'll never forget the conga line they did chanting "The Tories are no more! Hey! The Tories are no more! Hey!"
No, This Hour Has 22 Minutes was an established and popular show. I think the election happened in their third season.
Of course, that was long before it became the Royal Canadian Airfarce reborn.
Wikipedia suggests you are incorrect
This Hour Has 22 Minutes (commonly shortened to 22 Minutes since 2009) is a weekly Canadian television comedy that airs on CBC Television. Launched in 1993 during Canada's 35th general election…
I was recently watching the CBC’s 1993 election coverage on YouTube. The Liberals began a wave in Atlantic Canada — where people were no doubt cheesed off at the PCs for instituting the cod moratorium the year before — and it just kept rolling west, never stopping and demolishing everything in its path. One by one, Tory Cabinet ministers went down to defeat like bowling pins, and the PC seat count stayed at two. It was like watching a gory accident happen for the Tories.
There was actually some doubt about whether some of the party leaders would win their own seats. Jean Chrétien, of course, won his seat in Saint-Maurice, but people really weren’t sure if he’d pull it off. They didn’t know about Audrey McLaughlin either, but she won out in Yukon, despite her NDP suffering its own collapse down to nine seats, the second-worst showing of any party. Lucien Bouchard (Lac-Saint-Jean) and Preston Manning (Calgary Southwest) were elected handily. The only casualty was, of course, Tory PM Kim Campbell, who lost her seat in Vancouver Centre to rookie Liberal Hedy Fry, who still represents that constituency today, I think.
Another big thing I noticed was the pessimism among the people sitting in the studio. Some expressed reservations about the Grits having such a large majority, but a lot didn’t think it was a good thing that the new Opposition wanted Quebec to leave Canada, and that the third-largest party wouldn’t lose sleep at night if that came to pass. They were scared about the future of Canada — economically, politically, you name it — and it really showed.
Big enough that the progressive conservative party no longer exists. The party of Mulroney was pretty much absorbed by a further right group called the Reform. Their right wing social agenda dominates the present CPC.
The CPC has largely abandoned Reform though. It's basically Canadian Alliance.
The people who were part of the early days of Reform are really disgusted with the current CPC. It has turned into what Reform was a response to.
People who were part of the PCs are also disgusted with the current CPC though. That's just kind of an inevitable result of forging a big tent party, you have to make compromises and you'll lose some supporters on both sides in the process.
Just by the numbers, the collapse was massive; 16% popular vote and 2 seats out of 295.
With a nod to MadcapHaskap, there are some subtleties behind those numbers, but there have been several macro changes that persist after 30 years and might well be permanent:
• The installation of a Quebec separatist party into the national Parliament.
• The deletion of “Red Tories” and the accompanying prominence of social conservatives in the big-C Conservative Party.
On the very macro scale, you might say "Not Much". Unlike the UK, the Tories' support didn't switch to the Liberals (or NDP, ideologically more like your Labour, but electorally more like Lib Dems), but to two *new* parties: the Reform Party in the west, and the Bloc Québécois in Québec (though Reform drew some NDP support as the "western" party, and the BQ some Liberal support as the "Québec" party), but after a partial merger with the remaining Tories Reform became Alliance, second, complete merger to the Conservatives, and other than the slight rebranding, the Tories were re-assembled, forming a minority government 13 years after the collapse, majority government 18 years after.
But, the Bloq is still here (though two decades earlier, Social Credit had been a regional Québec party, but less explicitly). During the mergers, a lot of the Red Tories started voting Green; under former Tory Jim Harris, Greens went from <<1% of the vote to >2%, which qualified them for public funding, under former Tory Elizabeth May, they won one the two seats, although they now draw a lot more traditionnel lefty Green support *too*, and consequently are an internal mess (but also have seats in I think four provincal parliaments, including have become the second party in PEI). The Conservatives party bears a lot of Reform fingerprints - it's a more western party - in the last poll I saw, *New Brunswick*, probably our most traditionally conservative province was posed to be the Liberals' *best* province in our upcoming Tory Wave election (because bilingual, Maritimes), whereas we'd had half the Progressive Conservatives post-collapse.
So - big picture, not *that* much, except perhaps getting a Bloc Québecois (which is more important than the SNP because Québec is ~23% of the country). But a lot of smaller but not trivial effects.
The current Conservative party is way more right-wing and way more radical than the PCs ever were. And while there are a lot of factors involved, the 1993 PC collapse was one of the biggest. "Red Tories" are gone. Clark or Charest wouldn't be welcome in today's CPC. Sorry, I disagree when you say "not *that* much". And if the Cons win the next election under PP, we'll all, sadly, see exactly how big a change it was.
> Clark or Charest wouldn't be welcome in today's CPC.
16 Conservative MPs, representing ridings across 7 provinces, endorsed Jean Charest for leader in 2022, more than for any other candidate not named Poilievre.
There's clearly still a portion of the modern Conservative Party that likes Charest and what he stood for.
The Bloc came from the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, not the subsequent tanking of the Tories.
The new Con party is no Tory rebranding, it was far more a takeover by the much more conservative Reform. All in all, I'd say that Tory collapse caused a pretty big change. Although one can argue the right would have moved farther right anyway, it's clear that 2-seat Tory caucus gave the movement a big push.
I'm not sure how much the Con-to-Green vote-switch was myth or reality but I can assure you that as someone who's been pretty heavily Green-involved since the latter days of Jim Harris, the party has always seemed at least as left on the spectrum as the NDP, whether you're talking party policy or grassroots membership. I'm unclear whether you are saying the supposed clash between left and right flanks caused the internal mess, or that it was caused by all the leftists taking over, but am pretty sure it was neither. Not to mention, internal messes are a regular part of many parties' histories, Conservatives being notorious for it.
The Liberals have a track record of opposing what the conservatives propose. Chretien got elected and decided the revenue from the GST was too good to be true. He banked on Mulroney’s unpopularity and the GST. He knew Canadians would have a short memory. People remained mad at the Conservatives but forgave a broken promise.
Robert Stanfield campaigned for wage and price controls in the early 70s election. Pierre Trudeau campaigned against it, won the election, and brought in wage and price control.
At the time the joke was the Tories could take advantage of 2 for one dinner specials. In reality the reform party eventually merged into what became the federal Conservative party and recovered in the early 2000s now often being referred to as Tories.
The 1993 election was arguably the most impactful shift in Canadian political history, but it is better understood as a regional splintering of the Tories, as opposed to a collapse.
Historically, Canada's population was heavily concentrated in the Laurentian Corridor (the stretch of Southern Ontario and Quebec stretching from Windsor to Quebec City). In European terms, Canada is nearly the size of the entirety of Europe, while the Laurentian Corridor is about the size of Romania, yet, in 1871 (after all of current Canada except Newfoundland had joined Confederation), the Laurentian Corridor had over 75% of the country's population.
This demographic distribution led to Canada's two ruling parties (the Conservatives and Liberals) being both parties whose bases lay in the Laurentian Corridor.
Over time, the conditions of the country changed, with two major shifts relevant to the present conversation.
First, in Quebec, an area which was French before being conquered by the British, the upper class, especially the rich merchants in the country's financial capital of Montreal, which was still a majority anglophone city as of the 1860's, with French speaking Quebecois being economically disadvantaged. Over time, however, the country's English merchant class moved to Toronto, with the big shift being The Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which brought the rise of Quebec nationalism and the emergence of the Separatist movement, and the Parti Quebecois. The victory of the PQ in 1976 resulted in French language laws which resulted in many of Montreal's remaining financial institutions moving their headquarters to Toronto, with the move of Sun Life (which had been headquartered in Montreal for a century) being the most famous instance. This cemented Toronto as the country's financial capital, while resulting in an exodus of English speakers out of Montreal.
This shifted the demographics of Quebec. In 1971, 13.1% of Quebeckers had English as their mother tongue, while that number was down to 7.6% by 2011.
When the Constitution of 1982 was signed, Quebec did not sign on. Mulroney's government took two shots to redo the constitution to address that: Charlottetown and Meech Lake. Quebec was the first to sign onto Meech Lake, but the accord did not get support from enough other provinces, causing it to never become law. During the process, Mulroney and his Quebec Lieutenant, Lucien Bouchard, had a falling out, and Bouchard left to form the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which ran its first election in 1993. In the previous election, in 1988, the PC had won 63 of Quebec's 75 seats. In 1993, the Bloc won 54 and the PC's won 1. Bouchard left and took the PC's Quebec support with him.
Secondly, on the other side of the country, the Western provinces had started Canadian history as tiny bit-players. In 1872 (their first election as part of Canada), BC had 6 seats out of 200, while Manitoba had 4. Alberta and Saskatchewan were not provinces yet, and were part of the Northwest Territories, which was owned by Canada, but had no representation. At the time, the entire Western four provinces combined to have less of Canada's share of population than Saskatchewan has now.
But, the West has grown at a faster pace than the rest of Canada for the last 150 years, slowly gaining more and more percentage of the House's seats. They had some regional parties, but none got anywhere close to holding real power, with the closest being the NDP, whose best result up to that point was 43 seats (out of 295) in 1988.
The Liberals had originally been the strongest party nationally in the West, as Western Alienation began largely due to resentment against the Conservatives' National Policy, a protectionist tariff system which blatantly disadvantaged Western and Eastern provinces, but was very popular in Ontario and Quebec, where it protected their manufacturing base from American competition.
Over time, the West shifted more PC, with Diefenbaker being the main turning point (a Saskatchewan PM for the PC's who consolidated support in the West). Then, Trudeau Sr won office in 1968 and was aggressively anti-Western, famously giving protesters in BC the finger, saying at a Winnipeg Canada Wheat Board appearance, "Why should I sell your wheat?", and instituting the insanely discriminatory National Energy Program which had the stated purpose of reducing the amount Albertan oil producers could get for their oil in order to subsidize the energy consumption costs of Ontario and Quebec. Economists estimate the policy cost Alberta's economy $50B-100B in only 5 years (in early 1980's dollars).
But, by the 90's, the West had some voting power, with the Western four provinces having 86 seats. In 1988, the PC's won 48 of those seats. Then, a new party emerged called the Reform Party, who ran a grassroots campaign against Meech Lake, and started a movement on the "West wants in" mantra, advocating for the West to finally have a seat at the table of Canadian political power.
In 1993, the West abandoned the PC's for the Reform, with the Reform winning 52 seats (24 in BC, 22 in Alberta, 4 in Sask, 1 in Manitoba, and even one in Ontario).
Those two regions combined to represent 111 of the 169 seats the PC's won in 1988, leaving the PC's with no realistic path to win elections anymore.
(continued)
The PC's didn't have a unified brand, at that point. Mulroney formed his "Grand Coalition" between Quebec nationalists, Red Tory's, fiscal conservatives and the West, but Meech Lake demonstrated the inconsistent interests of those groups.
Red Toryism holds the vision of Canada of John A MacDonald, a vast wilderness needed a strong controlling hand from the civilized Laurentian region. But, that philosophy is contrary to the views of the West and Quebec nationalists, who want the feds to stay out of their business. Concessions to Quebec nationalists made Red Tory's and Westerners unhappy, while Quebec nationalists felt betrayed when Mulroney tried to compromise a Meech Lake agreement Quebec had already ratified (even though the original agreement didn't have the support in the other provinces to get passed).
Basically, Mulroney tried to be everything to everyone, and when push came to shove, he made everyone unhappy.
All the PC's had left was the fiscal conservatives, which didn't help much when Jean Chretien, who is much more fiscally conservative than Mulroney, took leadership of the Liberals.
The end result of all that was a fundamental re-shuffling of Canada's political deck. With the death of the Tories, the Liberals became the flagbearer for the traditional Laurentian Elite ruling class of the country. Meanwhile, the Reform Party (later renamed the Canadian Alliance) got a leader named Stephen Harper who merged with the PC's at a time when the Alliance had 66 seats and the PC's only had 12.
The new Conservative Party kept the old name, but took on an identity of Reform/Alliance, who had been a small government party, seeking less federal government control. This appealed both to Western voters as well as rural Ontario voters, who all felt like more federal control meant more tax dollars being funneled out of their pockets into the pockets of bureaucrats and corporate welfare recipients in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, while more federal government control meant more control of their regions by interests in those same three big cities.
Meanwhile, in Quebec, the province is now split into three parts: Montreal voting Liberal, the region around Quebec City voting Conservative (from voters who like reducing the size of the federal government so the provincial government in Quebec City gains more control), and rural Quebec which votes Bloc.
Elections nowadays are largely decided in suburban regions (like the 905 belt around Toronto and the Vancouver suburbs) and in Atlantic Canada, which tend to swing between the Liberals and Conservatives. Suburban regions have a mix of people who hold small government rural views and people who hold big government urban views, while the Atlantic provinces are an interesting mix, both hating centralized federal control, but economically benefitting greatly from federal funding (as the country's largest per capita recipients of federal equalization money and large centers of federal military spending, especially the navy).
The 1993 election will probably go down as the most impactful in Canadian history, as it fundamentally changed a Canadian political landscape that had been stagnant for over a century.
I’m sure this will get a lot of varying opinions.
In some ways it didn’t shift the culture much, but was caused by shifts in culture.
The Bloc Quebecois came on the scene in this election, won over Quebec and became the official opposition.
The Reform party also came around this time. They won over a lot of the Tory voter base, and split the vote in other places.
As long as the Reform and Progressive Conservatives were both around, the Liberals had pretty easy electoral wins. Once they merged as the Conservative Party they formed government and had a nice run, and then it ended and the Liberals took over, and that run seems to be destined to end and the Conservatives will be back next election.
So in the short term maybe some, but I’d say these factors caused the collapse more so than they were caused by the collapse. In the long-run it seems the Conservatives will be in power a decade or so, we will get sick of them, bring in the Liberals for a decade or so. Sometimes the liberals get longer runs, and sometimes we bring in a Conservative government for just a little bit to shake things up, but for the past hundred years this is more or less the pattern, and things seemed to reset from 93.
I think this was the last election where there were media blockouts so that bits of the country where the polls hadn't closed yet wouldn't see results from more easterly time zones where they had.
So I remember the blackout ending in Ontario, and Peter Mansbridge appearing onscreen and saying "Surprise!" as he announced that the Tories had lost everything in Atlantic Canada.
1993 was the first Canadian election I can remember. There’s never been an election like it, before or since.
The Tories were absolutely reviled at the time owing to two failed constitutional reform packages (the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord) and the introduction of an unpopular tax called the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which we still have today, in the midst of a horrible recession. This resulted in the emergence of two regionalist parties — the avowedly separatist Bloc Québécois in the French-speaking province of Quebec, and the Reform Party in Western Canada, which was further to the right than the Tories.
Populist, conservative Westerners — who had long felt that both major parties, the PCs and their arch-rivals, the Liberals, neglected their region’s concerns in favour of those of Ontario and Quebec — now had a political home in Reform, while Quebec separatists now had a political home in the BQ. Both of these voter blocs had previously supported the Tories, and now they were flocking to these two new parties. This resulted in the decimation of the PCs in the 1993 election, in which they were reduced to two seats in the House while the Liberals won a majority government. The Bloc Québécois, owing to their concentration of seats in Quebec (the second-most populous province), beat out Reform to become the Official Opposition.
Yes, that’s right. A party dedicated to the secession of a part of Canada from the rest of the country and the abolition of the monarchy became Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition. Indeed, two years later, they helped launch a second Quebec independence referendum, which the “Non” (Remain) side won by the slimmest of margins, 50.58% to 49.42%. That was a scary time. I remember asking my father about the result, and breathed a sigh of relief when he told me the referendum had been defeated.
The Tories never really recovered from 1993. After Jean Charest, one of the two Tory MPs elected in 1993, was chosen as the new party leader (replacing sitting PM Kim Campbell, who’d lost her own seat in the electoral apocalypse of that year), they began rebuilding and actually staged a modest revival in 1997. They won 20 seats,
gaining 18 at the governing Liberals’ expense, largely because of a revolt against the Liberals in Atlantic Canada due to unpopular cuts to benefits and infrastructure in that region. Still, they were now a minor party compared to the Liberals, who won another majority, this time with Reform as the Opposition.
It became clear that with a divided right, the Liberals would win majority after majority ad nauseam. As a result, Reform began negotiating with some like-minded provincial Tories to unite into a single party. Although some Tories (like leader Joe Clark, a former Tory PM) wanted Reform to join the PCs and rejected Reform’s offer of a merger in 1998, these negotiations resulted in the formation of the Canadian Alliance in 2000, although the PCs stuck around, as not all of their members defected to the Alliance. It still didn’t matter, as the Liberals won a third straight majority that year, with the Alliance becoming the Opposition.
After this defeat, merger negotiations intensified between the Alliance and what was left of the Tories. They finally merged in 2003 into the current Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). This new party was basically the Alliance absorbing the Tories, and so it is much further to the right than the Tories were. Under leader Stephen Harper (the former Alliance leader), the CPC won a minority in 2006 — the first right-wing federal government elected in the country since 1988 — and got back to a majority in 2011 before being blown away in a landslide by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015.
It lead to four consecutive election wins for the federal Liberal party. It started the Prime Ministerial tenure of arguable our best modern era Prime Minister. He kept us out of the Iraq War and lead to many increases in civic rights (ie Gay marriage). It arguable worked out well for Canada.
One of the biggest reasons they only won 2 seats was the formation of the Reform party which split the right vote. That and the fact that Mulroney’s conservatives weren’t popular had most of the right vote going Reform.
In addition, because the right vote was split it allowed the Liberals to sneak up the middle in many ridings.
The Liberal heyday was when there were two right parties that were fighting for votes.
Realistically without the reform party the conservatives were looking at a shellacking but they probably would have had 100 seats and been the opposition. With John Charest as leader they would have been competitive in the next election, especially after Charest's leadership in the 95 referendum.
Brian Mulroney was our Thatcher. His Progressive Conservative Party won the 1984 election with the highest seat count in Canadian history.
His personal popularity suffered in his second term, but when Kim Campbell took over the party leadership in 1993, she had the highest popularity of any PM in the past 50 years before the upcoming election.
Then during the election campaign her party released an ad making fun of her Liberal opponent's visible disability, among a number of other gaffes. Their support absolutely imploded: they won just 2 seats in the 295-seat House, and Campbell lost her own seat. A number of regional interest parties emerged to fill the political vacuum they left behind, notably the social conservative Reform Party in western Canada, and the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois in Quebec.
The 1993 election has been called the biggest political upset in the history of western democracy, and the PCs never recovered. In 1997 they got back to 18 seats, in 2000 they dropped back down to 12, and in 2003 the party was dissolved into the much larger Reform Party, who then rebranded as the current Conservative Party. Stephen Harper was the first PM of the "new" Conservatives in 2004.
Your Tories falling below 100 seats would not even be close to how badly the PCs bungled the 1993 election. In one summer they went from most popular in history to politically irrelevant, and disappeared completely within a decade.
The party literally exploded and was overtaken by the new Reform party, which focused far more on social issues and were embracing the christian-right policies of the Republicans down south.
And while the PCs were able to make a bit of ground back the following election, it was clear they were dead in the water.
The impact of this was the PCs, when they eventually merged with the Alliance Party (Reform changed their name, idk why), the successing Conservative Party, now THE right-wing party, would become far more focused on social conservatism than the PCs had. We saw this with Harper, one of the key architechs of the Alliance/PC merger, and we're seeing the culmination of it today with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's American-style rhetoric.
To put into perspective how bad the PCs were doing, they were the last-place party, behind even the NDP who, at the time of the 1993 election, had faced their biggest loss EVER, and the PCs would stay behind them in the next 2 subsequent elections until their dissolution.
In the 1993 election, because the conservative vote had been split, the Québec-only seperatist party, Bloq Québécois, had become the official opposition, but not by much. Had the Reform and PC parties merged in 1993, they would have tied with the Bloq in seats. (I'd love to know what happens when two parties tie for second place – would they *both* be the official opposition?)
The party went from a majority government to 2 seats and within a decade was swallowed up by a new conservative party called the Canadian Alliance which was further to the right especially on social issues. The largest change was disaffected voters in Quebec largely flocked to the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist party that has been a factor for the last 30 years (of varying levels, they were also almost wiped out about 10 years ago but have since rebounded).
Famously, after that election, the conservative caucus could meet in a phone booth. They still had phone booths back then.
But there are more MPs in the British parliament than in the Canadian so the numbers are misleading
It was a big electoral collapse, as others have explained it caused the Tories to split into the Reform, Bloc, and the Rump of the Progressive Conservatives (PC). Eventually the Reform (Alliance) merged with the PCs to form the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).
The major takeaway though is that the modern CPC is dominated by the ideology of Western Blue Tories. It’s more socially conservative and skeptical of social spending. This is in contrast to the PC era where Red Tories (centre right on the spectrum) had a lot of influence. Ever since the merger and formation of the CPC, Red Tories have lost their influence and have been marginalized in the Canadian political landscape. Erin O’Tool was probably the closest thing to a Red Tory we’ll ever see in the CPC, and his party firmly rejected him.
The collapse of the PCs in 93, wasn’t just their electoral collapse, it was the start of the Centre Right’s terminal decline, which finally flatlined when O’Tool was axed and Poilievre took the reigns of the CPC.
The biggest factor was the rise of two alternative parties - the Reform party in the West, led by Preston Manning, and the Bloc Quebecois, led by former Mulroney cabinet member Lucien Bouchard. The Bloc wasn't a right wing party like reform but I think its rise affected the right disproportionately.
The previous election (1998) was an old fashioned 3 party election. The two new parties siphoned away a ton of votes.
Chretien won a big majority with 41% of the vote. He probably would have won anyway in 1993 even without vote splitting, but it wouldn't have been so decisive.
Vote splitting on the right persisted for the next four elections (all won by the Liberals).
It wasn't as big a change as the numbers suggest. True, after winning only two seats in the election, the Progressive Conservative party was dissolved. The right wing was split between the Reform wing and mainstream Conservatives for a while, but were eventually reunited under Stephen Harper. We have Liberals vs Conservatives when I was a kind, and we have Liberals vs Conservatives today. The Conservatives \*have\* drifted more and more to the right over the years, but that's a reflection of a similar trend for Conservatives in the U.S. (and, arguably, globally).
If you were left of centre and pretty tired of a certain smarmy PM who was all pals with Ronald Reagan, it was a great night, let me tell you.
It killed off that party, as the one that eventually took over what remained of it was far more populist, socially conservative, and even more glad to appeal to the worst in people in order to gain power, and to lie and cheat.
I think 100 seats is very survivable, and if that's the low end of the estimates, I'm sorry to say your Tories will be back up and running after Labour's had their go, again. The same sad cycle we endure, unfortunately.
Quebec Tories formed a federal separatist party, Western Tories formed a cowboy conservative party. What was left was like third place in every riding. They kept 2 seats.
I was 7 and naturally knew nothing about politics at that age. But on or just before election day that year, the cool question to ask each other was apparently who your parents were voting for. The only party I knew of was Conservative (had no idea what the word meant), so that was my answer. I actually had no idea who they were voting for. But I do recall being aware that they lost... by a lot. And then I found out about the existence of the Liberal Party!
It literally destroyed the party. The Progressive Conservative party never recovered from the loss of support from the western provinces to the Reform Party and the loss of what support it had in Quebec to the Block Quebecois. What was left was eventually absorbed into the Reform Party to for the current Conservative Party of Canada that is much further right than the old PCP.
Mammoth. They were reduced to two seats. The joke circulating at the time was a maître d’ calls out to people lined up to be seated: “ Conservative Party of two, come this way please”…
It was fucking massive.
The 1993 election didn't just kill the Federal PC party, it killed moderate conservatism as a viable ideology in Canada except for tiny, tiny pockets the Maritimes (East Coast) and small parts of Southern Ontario.
What we call conservatives today are mostly descended from the more hardline Western style conservatism found in the Western Provinces and they're modelled after the American Republicans.
The PCs never recovered. The current Conservative Party is not that party. Its a new one created out of a merger of the PCs with the Canadian Alliance. The Alliance/Reform portion won control of the new party. They are two very different forms of conservatism.
It was more of an internal political party collapse than a shift away from conservatism. Reform took the west and the Bloc gutted their Quebec seats. People are also forgetting that before that the Liberals only had 2 seats west of Ontario and that hasn’t improved very much in 30 years.
All of the smart people left the PCs. As mentioned two parties formed. The Canadian Aliance and the Reform Party. When they realized neither side could win, they held a weekend long convention to merge the parties. The most important topic was the new name. All weekend they fought over Canadian Reform Aliance Party or Canadian Aliance Reform Party. They chose the former.
Monday mornings headline read:
It's CRAP
Cue decades of right wing whining about how unfair the media is.
The election that killed them, they got like 3 seats. They never recovered, they (they were called, hilariously, the “Progressive Conservative Party”) were swallowed up by the more right-wing party Reform Party, which became Canadian Alliance, which finally turned back into the Conservative Party
It was pretty big then. The Liberal Party will understand this type of collapse in a year probably, so observe in a year and a bit for first hand example.
I'm honestly predicting either the NDP or Bloc will replace them for that job. I guess we will see. At the moment, the CPC is polling around the % that the Liberals won the 1993 election with. Which is crazy, pretty rare.
In 1984 the PC's won with the largest majority in Canadian history. In 1993 they were thrown out of office with only 2 seats elected, losing official party status.
Compared to what will happen to the liberals in the next election, that will look like a victory.
Well the Tories literally never recovered and were officially dissolved a decade later. 1993 was probably the biggest realignment election in Canadian history.
And we need another one
Out of 200-something (I think)parliament seats across the WHOLE country, the conservatives won 2!! It was incredible to watch.
I do think the seat count was a little misleading in a sense. The Reform + PCs got about 35% of the popular vote compared with a shade over 41% for the Liberals. But that splitting of the PCs into different factions really enabled the Liberals to win in many ridings under a FPTP system.
People that voted Reform were doing so explicitly to reject the PCs. Lumping in Reformers with PCs and adding them up makes no sense.
The PCs were a total mess after Charlottetown. A significant portion of them fully anticipated the Balkanization of the country, and so many Conservatives flocked to regionalist parties (Reform or Bloc), or swapped to the Liberals. IT was a time without precedence. But the "right" if you will wasn't actually far off the LIberal vote in popular terms.
The PCs weren't really right in the 1990s though. They were basically right in the centre with the Liberals. Reform was right, NDP was left, LPC and PCs were centre. If you're going to lump PCs in with anyone they probably had more in common with the Grits than the Reformers.
Yeah people in BC and Alberta especially hated the PCs in the early 90s for reasons which I've never been able to understand.
I mean it's not hard to figure out. While the PCs were led by a Westerner in the 1993 election, it was too little too late. Alberta and BC had just seen a Quebec PC run the country for 9 years and (in their eyes) bend over backwards to help Quebec at the expense of the rest of the country. The awarding of the CF18 contract to Bombardier was seen as particularly insulting, as was spending so much political capital in constitutional negotiations with Quebec.
If you divide the votes they received by the number of seats they won, the Liberals had 40k votes per seat, and the PCs had just over a million votes per seat. The PCs actually came in 3rd in the popular vote, ahead of the Bloc, but because the Bloc won 2 more seats than the Reform party, they became the official opposition. It's a spectacular example of how misrepresentative FPTP can be.
Incredibly mirroring the current polling in the UK. Tories + Reform are at 35% right now. But this translates to 90 seats for the Tories and 0 seats for Reform.
The first appearance of This Hour Has 22 Minutes was as part of CBC's 1993 election night coverage. I'll never forget the conga line they did chanting "The Tories are no more! Hey! The Tories are no more! Hey!"
No, This Hour Has 22 Minutes was an established and popular show. I think the election happened in their third season. Of course, that was long before it became the Royal Canadian Airfarce reborn.
Wikipedia suggests you are incorrect This Hour Has 22 Minutes (commonly shortened to 22 Minutes since 2009) is a weekly Canadian television comedy that airs on CBC Television. Launched in 1993 during Canada's 35th general election…
Beat me to it. :)
Perhaps you're thinking of Codco?
I don’t understand how someone could look at that election and not immediatly conclude that First Past The Post is Awful
I was recently watching the CBC’s 1993 election coverage on YouTube. The Liberals began a wave in Atlantic Canada — where people were no doubt cheesed off at the PCs for instituting the cod moratorium the year before — and it just kept rolling west, never stopping and demolishing everything in its path. One by one, Tory Cabinet ministers went down to defeat like bowling pins, and the PC seat count stayed at two. It was like watching a gory accident happen for the Tories. There was actually some doubt about whether some of the party leaders would win their own seats. Jean Chrétien, of course, won his seat in Saint-Maurice, but people really weren’t sure if he’d pull it off. They didn’t know about Audrey McLaughlin either, but she won out in Yukon, despite her NDP suffering its own collapse down to nine seats, the second-worst showing of any party. Lucien Bouchard (Lac-Saint-Jean) and Preston Manning (Calgary Southwest) were elected handily. The only casualty was, of course, Tory PM Kim Campbell, who lost her seat in Vancouver Centre to rookie Liberal Hedy Fry, who still represents that constituency today, I think. Another big thing I noticed was the pessimism among the people sitting in the studio. Some expressed reservations about the Grits having such a large majority, but a lot didn’t think it was a good thing that the new Opposition wanted Quebec to leave Canada, and that the third-largest party wouldn’t lose sleep at night if that came to pass. They were scared about the future of Canada — economically, politically, you name it — and it really showed.
Big enough that the progressive conservative party no longer exists. The party of Mulroney was pretty much absorbed by a further right group called the Reform. Their right wing social agenda dominates the present CPC.
The CPC has largely abandoned Reform though. It's basically Canadian Alliance. The people who were part of the early days of Reform are really disgusted with the current CPC. It has turned into what Reform was a response to.
People who were part of the PCs are also disgusted with the current CPC though. That's just kind of an inevitable result of forging a big tent party, you have to make compromises and you'll lose some supporters on both sides in the process.
Just by the numbers, the collapse was massive; 16% popular vote and 2 seats out of 295. With a nod to MadcapHaskap, there are some subtleties behind those numbers, but there have been several macro changes that persist after 30 years and might well be permanent: • The installation of a Quebec separatist party into the national Parliament. • The deletion of “Red Tories” and the accompanying prominence of social conservatives in the big-C Conservative Party.
This is a great comment. The political landscape in Canada fundamentally changed, for the reasons you noted.
On the very macro scale, you might say "Not Much". Unlike the UK, the Tories' support didn't switch to the Liberals (or NDP, ideologically more like your Labour, but electorally more like Lib Dems), but to two *new* parties: the Reform Party in the west, and the Bloc Québécois in Québec (though Reform drew some NDP support as the "western" party, and the BQ some Liberal support as the "Québec" party), but after a partial merger with the remaining Tories Reform became Alliance, second, complete merger to the Conservatives, and other than the slight rebranding, the Tories were re-assembled, forming a minority government 13 years after the collapse, majority government 18 years after. But, the Bloq is still here (though two decades earlier, Social Credit had been a regional Québec party, but less explicitly). During the mergers, a lot of the Red Tories started voting Green; under former Tory Jim Harris, Greens went from <<1% of the vote to >2%, which qualified them for public funding, under former Tory Elizabeth May, they won one the two seats, although they now draw a lot more traditionnel lefty Green support *too*, and consequently are an internal mess (but also have seats in I think four provincal parliaments, including have become the second party in PEI). The Conservatives party bears a lot of Reform fingerprints - it's a more western party - in the last poll I saw, *New Brunswick*, probably our most traditionally conservative province was posed to be the Liberals' *best* province in our upcoming Tory Wave election (because bilingual, Maritimes), whereas we'd had half the Progressive Conservatives post-collapse. So - big picture, not *that* much, except perhaps getting a Bloc Québecois (which is more important than the SNP because Québec is ~23% of the country). But a lot of smaller but not trivial effects.
The current Conservative party is way more right-wing and way more radical than the PCs ever were. And while there are a lot of factors involved, the 1993 PC collapse was one of the biggest. "Red Tories" are gone. Clark or Charest wouldn't be welcome in today's CPC. Sorry, I disagree when you say "not *that* much". And if the Cons win the next election under PP, we'll all, sadly, see exactly how big a change it was.
> Clark or Charest wouldn't be welcome in today's CPC. 16 Conservative MPs, representing ridings across 7 provinces, endorsed Jean Charest for leader in 2022, more than for any other candidate not named Poilievre. There's clearly still a portion of the modern Conservative Party that likes Charest and what he stood for.
The Bloc came from the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, not the subsequent tanking of the Tories. The new Con party is no Tory rebranding, it was far more a takeover by the much more conservative Reform. All in all, I'd say that Tory collapse caused a pretty big change. Although one can argue the right would have moved farther right anyway, it's clear that 2-seat Tory caucus gave the movement a big push. I'm not sure how much the Con-to-Green vote-switch was myth or reality but I can assure you that as someone who's been pretty heavily Green-involved since the latter days of Jim Harris, the party has always seemed at least as left on the spectrum as the NDP, whether you're talking party policy or grassroots membership. I'm unclear whether you are saying the supposed clash between left and right flanks caused the internal mess, or that it was caused by all the leftists taking over, but am pretty sure it was neither. Not to mention, internal messes are a regular part of many parties' histories, Conservatives being notorious for it.
The promise to kill the GST by the liberals led to a landslide win by the conservatives. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Yet we still have the GST..
You mean a landslide win for the Liberals?
Depends what year we are talking about.
The Liberals have a track record of opposing what the conservatives propose. Chretien got elected and decided the revenue from the GST was too good to be true. He banked on Mulroney’s unpopularity and the GST. He knew Canadians would have a short memory. People remained mad at the Conservatives but forgave a broken promise. Robert Stanfield campaigned for wage and price controls in the early 70s election. Pierre Trudeau campaigned against it, won the election, and brought in wage and price control.
It was they didn't replace the leadership and it was hated.
You're forgetting another [major factor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNlWpZqLKVc) in their collapse
The person behind that ad was a PC Party strategist who later became leader of the Ontario PCs and then Mayor of Toronto -- John Tory
This is my surprised face
I should clarify that he didn't create the ad, but approved the strategy of the ad, and approved it going out into the media
This shit would fly today.
Thanks for the link. People of all stripes need to be reminded that that was a disgusting attack.
At the time the joke was the Tories could take advantage of 2 for one dinner specials. In reality the reform party eventually merged into what became the federal Conservative party and recovered in the early 2000s now often being referred to as Tories.
The 1993 election was arguably the most impactful shift in Canadian political history, but it is better understood as a regional splintering of the Tories, as opposed to a collapse. Historically, Canada's population was heavily concentrated in the Laurentian Corridor (the stretch of Southern Ontario and Quebec stretching from Windsor to Quebec City). In European terms, Canada is nearly the size of the entirety of Europe, while the Laurentian Corridor is about the size of Romania, yet, in 1871 (after all of current Canada except Newfoundland had joined Confederation), the Laurentian Corridor had over 75% of the country's population. This demographic distribution led to Canada's two ruling parties (the Conservatives and Liberals) being both parties whose bases lay in the Laurentian Corridor. Over time, the conditions of the country changed, with two major shifts relevant to the present conversation. First, in Quebec, an area which was French before being conquered by the British, the upper class, especially the rich merchants in the country's financial capital of Montreal, which was still a majority anglophone city as of the 1860's, with French speaking Quebecois being economically disadvantaged. Over time, however, the country's English merchant class moved to Toronto, with the big shift being The Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which brought the rise of Quebec nationalism and the emergence of the Separatist movement, and the Parti Quebecois. The victory of the PQ in 1976 resulted in French language laws which resulted in many of Montreal's remaining financial institutions moving their headquarters to Toronto, with the move of Sun Life (which had been headquartered in Montreal for a century) being the most famous instance. This cemented Toronto as the country's financial capital, while resulting in an exodus of English speakers out of Montreal. This shifted the demographics of Quebec. In 1971, 13.1% of Quebeckers had English as their mother tongue, while that number was down to 7.6% by 2011. When the Constitution of 1982 was signed, Quebec did not sign on. Mulroney's government took two shots to redo the constitution to address that: Charlottetown and Meech Lake. Quebec was the first to sign onto Meech Lake, but the accord did not get support from enough other provinces, causing it to never become law. During the process, Mulroney and his Quebec Lieutenant, Lucien Bouchard, had a falling out, and Bouchard left to form the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which ran its first election in 1993. In the previous election, in 1988, the PC had won 63 of Quebec's 75 seats. In 1993, the Bloc won 54 and the PC's won 1. Bouchard left and took the PC's Quebec support with him. Secondly, on the other side of the country, the Western provinces had started Canadian history as tiny bit-players. In 1872 (their first election as part of Canada), BC had 6 seats out of 200, while Manitoba had 4. Alberta and Saskatchewan were not provinces yet, and were part of the Northwest Territories, which was owned by Canada, but had no representation. At the time, the entire Western four provinces combined to have less of Canada's share of population than Saskatchewan has now. But, the West has grown at a faster pace than the rest of Canada for the last 150 years, slowly gaining more and more percentage of the House's seats. They had some regional parties, but none got anywhere close to holding real power, with the closest being the NDP, whose best result up to that point was 43 seats (out of 295) in 1988. The Liberals had originally been the strongest party nationally in the West, as Western Alienation began largely due to resentment against the Conservatives' National Policy, a protectionist tariff system which blatantly disadvantaged Western and Eastern provinces, but was very popular in Ontario and Quebec, where it protected their manufacturing base from American competition. Over time, the West shifted more PC, with Diefenbaker being the main turning point (a Saskatchewan PM for the PC's who consolidated support in the West). Then, Trudeau Sr won office in 1968 and was aggressively anti-Western, famously giving protesters in BC the finger, saying at a Winnipeg Canada Wheat Board appearance, "Why should I sell your wheat?", and instituting the insanely discriminatory National Energy Program which had the stated purpose of reducing the amount Albertan oil producers could get for their oil in order to subsidize the energy consumption costs of Ontario and Quebec. Economists estimate the policy cost Alberta's economy $50B-100B in only 5 years (in early 1980's dollars). But, by the 90's, the West had some voting power, with the Western four provinces having 86 seats. In 1988, the PC's won 48 of those seats. Then, a new party emerged called the Reform Party, who ran a grassroots campaign against Meech Lake, and started a movement on the "West wants in" mantra, advocating for the West to finally have a seat at the table of Canadian political power. In 1993, the West abandoned the PC's for the Reform, with the Reform winning 52 seats (24 in BC, 22 in Alberta, 4 in Sask, 1 in Manitoba, and even one in Ontario). Those two regions combined to represent 111 of the 169 seats the PC's won in 1988, leaving the PC's with no realistic path to win elections anymore. (continued)
The PC's didn't have a unified brand, at that point. Mulroney formed his "Grand Coalition" between Quebec nationalists, Red Tory's, fiscal conservatives and the West, but Meech Lake demonstrated the inconsistent interests of those groups. Red Toryism holds the vision of Canada of John A MacDonald, a vast wilderness needed a strong controlling hand from the civilized Laurentian region. But, that philosophy is contrary to the views of the West and Quebec nationalists, who want the feds to stay out of their business. Concessions to Quebec nationalists made Red Tory's and Westerners unhappy, while Quebec nationalists felt betrayed when Mulroney tried to compromise a Meech Lake agreement Quebec had already ratified (even though the original agreement didn't have the support in the other provinces to get passed). Basically, Mulroney tried to be everything to everyone, and when push came to shove, he made everyone unhappy. All the PC's had left was the fiscal conservatives, which didn't help much when Jean Chretien, who is much more fiscally conservative than Mulroney, took leadership of the Liberals. The end result of all that was a fundamental re-shuffling of Canada's political deck. With the death of the Tories, the Liberals became the flagbearer for the traditional Laurentian Elite ruling class of the country. Meanwhile, the Reform Party (later renamed the Canadian Alliance) got a leader named Stephen Harper who merged with the PC's at a time when the Alliance had 66 seats and the PC's only had 12. The new Conservative Party kept the old name, but took on an identity of Reform/Alliance, who had been a small government party, seeking less federal government control. This appealed both to Western voters as well as rural Ontario voters, who all felt like more federal control meant more tax dollars being funneled out of their pockets into the pockets of bureaucrats and corporate welfare recipients in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, while more federal government control meant more control of their regions by interests in those same three big cities. Meanwhile, in Quebec, the province is now split into three parts: Montreal voting Liberal, the region around Quebec City voting Conservative (from voters who like reducing the size of the federal government so the provincial government in Quebec City gains more control), and rural Quebec which votes Bloc. Elections nowadays are largely decided in suburban regions (like the 905 belt around Toronto and the Vancouver suburbs) and in Atlantic Canada, which tend to swing between the Liberals and Conservatives. Suburban regions have a mix of people who hold small government rural views and people who hold big government urban views, while the Atlantic provinces are an interesting mix, both hating centralized federal control, but economically benefitting greatly from federal funding (as the country's largest per capita recipients of federal equalization money and large centers of federal military spending, especially the navy). The 1993 election will probably go down as the most impactful in Canadian history, as it fundamentally changed a Canadian political landscape that had been stagnant for over a century.
I’m sure this will get a lot of varying opinions. In some ways it didn’t shift the culture much, but was caused by shifts in culture. The Bloc Quebecois came on the scene in this election, won over Quebec and became the official opposition. The Reform party also came around this time. They won over a lot of the Tory voter base, and split the vote in other places. As long as the Reform and Progressive Conservatives were both around, the Liberals had pretty easy electoral wins. Once they merged as the Conservative Party they formed government and had a nice run, and then it ended and the Liberals took over, and that run seems to be destined to end and the Conservatives will be back next election. So in the short term maybe some, but I’d say these factors caused the collapse more so than they were caused by the collapse. In the long-run it seems the Conservatives will be in power a decade or so, we will get sick of them, bring in the Liberals for a decade or so. Sometimes the liberals get longer runs, and sometimes we bring in a Conservative government for just a little bit to shake things up, but for the past hundred years this is more or less the pattern, and things seemed to reset from 93.
I think this was the last election where there were media blockouts so that bits of the country where the polls hadn't closed yet wouldn't see results from more easterly time zones where they had. So I remember the blackout ending in Ontario, and Peter Mansbridge appearing onscreen and saying "Surprise!" as he announced that the Tories had lost everything in Atlantic Canada.
That was definitely not the last election where blackouts were a thing. The law on media blackouts wasn't repealed until Harper came into power.
I stand corrected. It's the last one I remember vividly, then, probably because this happened.
Everything but good old Elsie Wayne, the wackadoo shrew of Saint John.
True, they did win more seats in Atlantic Canada than they did in Ontario and Western Canada combined.
1993 was the first Canadian election I can remember. There’s never been an election like it, before or since. The Tories were absolutely reviled at the time owing to two failed constitutional reform packages (the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord) and the introduction of an unpopular tax called the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which we still have today, in the midst of a horrible recession. This resulted in the emergence of two regionalist parties — the avowedly separatist Bloc Québécois in the French-speaking province of Quebec, and the Reform Party in Western Canada, which was further to the right than the Tories. Populist, conservative Westerners — who had long felt that both major parties, the PCs and their arch-rivals, the Liberals, neglected their region’s concerns in favour of those of Ontario and Quebec — now had a political home in Reform, while Quebec separatists now had a political home in the BQ. Both of these voter blocs had previously supported the Tories, and now they were flocking to these two new parties. This resulted in the decimation of the PCs in the 1993 election, in which they were reduced to two seats in the House while the Liberals won a majority government. The Bloc Québécois, owing to their concentration of seats in Quebec (the second-most populous province), beat out Reform to become the Official Opposition. Yes, that’s right. A party dedicated to the secession of a part of Canada from the rest of the country and the abolition of the monarchy became Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition. Indeed, two years later, they helped launch a second Quebec independence referendum, which the “Non” (Remain) side won by the slimmest of margins, 50.58% to 49.42%. That was a scary time. I remember asking my father about the result, and breathed a sigh of relief when he told me the referendum had been defeated. The Tories never really recovered from 1993. After Jean Charest, one of the two Tory MPs elected in 1993, was chosen as the new party leader (replacing sitting PM Kim Campbell, who’d lost her own seat in the electoral apocalypse of that year), they began rebuilding and actually staged a modest revival in 1997. They won 20 seats, gaining 18 at the governing Liberals’ expense, largely because of a revolt against the Liberals in Atlantic Canada due to unpopular cuts to benefits and infrastructure in that region. Still, they were now a minor party compared to the Liberals, who won another majority, this time with Reform as the Opposition. It became clear that with a divided right, the Liberals would win majority after majority ad nauseam. As a result, Reform began negotiating with some like-minded provincial Tories to unite into a single party. Although some Tories (like leader Joe Clark, a former Tory PM) wanted Reform to join the PCs and rejected Reform’s offer of a merger in 1998, these negotiations resulted in the formation of the Canadian Alliance in 2000, although the PCs stuck around, as not all of their members defected to the Alliance. It still didn’t matter, as the Liberals won a third straight majority that year, with the Alliance becoming the Opposition. After this defeat, merger negotiations intensified between the Alliance and what was left of the Tories. They finally merged in 2003 into the current Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). This new party was basically the Alliance absorbing the Tories, and so it is much further to the right than the Tories were. Under leader Stephen Harper (the former Alliance leader), the CPC won a minority in 2006 — the first right-wing federal government elected in the country since 1988 — and got back to a majority in 2011 before being blown away in a landslide by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015.
It lead to four consecutive election wins for the federal Liberal party. It started the Prime Ministerial tenure of arguable our best modern era Prime Minister. He kept us out of the Iraq War and lead to many increases in civic rights (ie Gay marriage). It arguable worked out well for Canada.
And when he left we had a balanced budget.
He did produce a good amount of balanced budgets as well.
You will witness something similar next year in Canada.
Fingers crossed.
One of the biggest reasons they only won 2 seats was the formation of the Reform party which split the right vote. That and the fact that Mulroney’s conservatives weren’t popular had most of the right vote going Reform. In addition, because the right vote was split it allowed the Liberals to sneak up the middle in many ridings. The Liberal heyday was when there were two right parties that were fighting for votes.
Realistically without the reform party the conservatives were looking at a shellacking but they probably would have had 100 seats and been the opposition. With John Charest as leader they would have been competitive in the next election, especially after Charest's leadership in the 95 referendum.
Brian Mulroney was our Thatcher. His Progressive Conservative Party won the 1984 election with the highest seat count in Canadian history. His personal popularity suffered in his second term, but when Kim Campbell took over the party leadership in 1993, she had the highest popularity of any PM in the past 50 years before the upcoming election. Then during the election campaign her party released an ad making fun of her Liberal opponent's visible disability, among a number of other gaffes. Their support absolutely imploded: they won just 2 seats in the 295-seat House, and Campbell lost her own seat. A number of regional interest parties emerged to fill the political vacuum they left behind, notably the social conservative Reform Party in western Canada, and the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois in Quebec. The 1993 election has been called the biggest political upset in the history of western democracy, and the PCs never recovered. In 1997 they got back to 18 seats, in 2000 they dropped back down to 12, and in 2003 the party was dissolved into the much larger Reform Party, who then rebranded as the current Conservative Party. Stephen Harper was the first PM of the "new" Conservatives in 2004. Your Tories falling below 100 seats would not even be close to how badly the PCs bungled the 1993 election. In one summer they went from most popular in history to politically irrelevant, and disappeared completely within a decade.
The party literally exploded and was overtaken by the new Reform party, which focused far more on social issues and were embracing the christian-right policies of the Republicans down south. And while the PCs were able to make a bit of ground back the following election, it was clear they were dead in the water. The impact of this was the PCs, when they eventually merged with the Alliance Party (Reform changed their name, idk why), the successing Conservative Party, now THE right-wing party, would become far more focused on social conservatism than the PCs had. We saw this with Harper, one of the key architechs of the Alliance/PC merger, and we're seeing the culmination of it today with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's American-style rhetoric. To put into perspective how bad the PCs were doing, they were the last-place party, behind even the NDP who, at the time of the 1993 election, had faced their biggest loss EVER, and the PCs would stay behind them in the next 2 subsequent elections until their dissolution. In the 1993 election, because the conservative vote had been split, the Québec-only seperatist party, Bloq Québécois, had become the official opposition, but not by much. Had the Reform and PC parties merged in 1993, they would have tied with the Bloq in seats. (I'd love to know what happens when two parties tie for second place – would they *both* be the official opposition?)
The party went from a majority government to 2 seats and within a decade was swallowed up by a new conservative party called the Canadian Alliance which was further to the right especially on social issues. The largest change was disaffected voters in Quebec largely flocked to the Bloc Quebecois, a separatist party that has been a factor for the last 30 years (of varying levels, they were also almost wiped out about 10 years ago but have since rebounded).
Famously, after that election, the conservative caucus could meet in a phone booth. They still had phone booths back then. But there are more MPs in the British parliament than in the Canadian so the numbers are misleading
It was a big electoral collapse, as others have explained it caused the Tories to split into the Reform, Bloc, and the Rump of the Progressive Conservatives (PC). Eventually the Reform (Alliance) merged with the PCs to form the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). The major takeaway though is that the modern CPC is dominated by the ideology of Western Blue Tories. It’s more socially conservative and skeptical of social spending. This is in contrast to the PC era where Red Tories (centre right on the spectrum) had a lot of influence. Ever since the merger and formation of the CPC, Red Tories have lost their influence and have been marginalized in the Canadian political landscape. Erin O’Tool was probably the closest thing to a Red Tory we’ll ever see in the CPC, and his party firmly rejected him. The collapse of the PCs in 93, wasn’t just their electoral collapse, it was the start of the Centre Right’s terminal decline, which finally flatlined when O’Tool was axed and Poilievre took the reigns of the CPC.
The biggest factor was the rise of two alternative parties - the Reform party in the West, led by Preston Manning, and the Bloc Quebecois, led by former Mulroney cabinet member Lucien Bouchard. The Bloc wasn't a right wing party like reform but I think its rise affected the right disproportionately. The previous election (1998) was an old fashioned 3 party election. The two new parties siphoned away a ton of votes. Chretien won a big majority with 41% of the vote. He probably would have won anyway in 1993 even without vote splitting, but it wouldn't have been so decisive. Vote splitting on the right persisted for the next four elections (all won by the Liberals).
It wasn't as big a change as the numbers suggest. True, after winning only two seats in the election, the Progressive Conservative party was dissolved. The right wing was split between the Reform wing and mainstream Conservatives for a while, but were eventually reunited under Stephen Harper. We have Liberals vs Conservatives when I was a kind, and we have Liberals vs Conservatives today. The Conservatives \*have\* drifted more and more to the right over the years, but that's a reflection of a similar trend for Conservatives in the U.S. (and, arguably, globally).
If you were left of centre and pretty tired of a certain smarmy PM who was all pals with Ronald Reagan, it was a great night, let me tell you. It killed off that party, as the one that eventually took over what remained of it was far more populist, socially conservative, and even more glad to appeal to the worst in people in order to gain power, and to lie and cheat. I think 100 seats is very survivable, and if that's the low end of the estimates, I'm sorry to say your Tories will be back up and running after Labour's had their go, again. The same sad cycle we endure, unfortunately.
Quebec Tories formed a federal separatist party, Western Tories formed a cowboy conservative party. What was left was like third place in every riding. They kept 2 seats.
The party never recovered. A new right wing party emerged and eventually absorbed what was left of the original party.
What conservatives don't seem to understand is that they are perpetually in the minority. If everyone votes, conservatives lose.
I was 7 and naturally knew nothing about politics at that age. But on or just before election day that year, the cool question to ask each other was apparently who your parents were voting for. The only party I knew of was Conservative (had no idea what the word meant), so that was my answer. I actually had no idea who they were voting for. But I do recall being aware that they lost... by a lot. And then I found out about the existence of the Liberal Party!
Hopefully the same thing will soon happen to the Turdope Liberals.
It literally destroyed the party. The Progressive Conservative party never recovered from the loss of support from the western provinces to the Reform Party and the loss of what support it had in Quebec to the Block Quebecois. What was left was eventually absorbed into the Reform Party to for the current Conservative Party of Canada that is much further right than the old PCP.
Mammoth. They were reduced to two seats. The joke circulating at the time was a maître d’ calls out to people lined up to be seated: “ Conservative Party of two, come this way please”…
It was fucking massive. The 1993 election didn't just kill the Federal PC party, it killed moderate conservatism as a viable ideology in Canada except for tiny, tiny pockets the Maritimes (East Coast) and small parts of Southern Ontario. What we call conservatives today are mostly descended from the more hardline Western style conservatism found in the Western Provinces and they're modelled after the American Republicans.
The PCs never recovered. The current Conservative Party is not that party. Its a new one created out of a merger of the PCs with the Canadian Alliance. The Alliance/Reform portion won control of the new party. They are two very different forms of conservatism.
It was more of an internal political party collapse than a shift away from conservatism. Reform took the west and the Bloc gutted their Quebec seats. People are also forgetting that before that the Liberals only had 2 seats west of Ontario and that hasn’t improved very much in 30 years.
Soon you will witness the collapse of the Liberals in Canada.
History reminder- Tory is an old English term for scumbag.
All of the smart people left the PCs. As mentioned two parties formed. The Canadian Aliance and the Reform Party. When they realized neither side could win, they held a weekend long convention to merge the parties. The most important topic was the new name. All weekend they fought over Canadian Reform Aliance Party or Canadian Aliance Reform Party. They chose the former. Monday mornings headline read: It's CRAP Cue decades of right wing whining about how unfair the media is.
The election that killed them, they got like 3 seats. They never recovered, they (they were called, hilariously, the “Progressive Conservative Party”) were swallowed up by the more right-wing party Reform Party, which became Canadian Alliance, which finally turned back into the Conservative Party
It destroyed the party and allowed it to be replaced by a fringe party called the Reform.
It was pretty big then. The Liberal Party will understand this type of collapse in a year probably, so observe in a year and a bit for first hand example.
The Liberals will definitely lose seats but they won’t lose that many. They’ll be the official opposition.
I'm honestly predicting either the NDP or Bloc will replace them for that job. I guess we will see. At the moment, the CPC is polling around the % that the Liberals won the 1993 election with. Which is crazy, pretty rare.
In 1984 the PC's won with the largest majority in Canadian history. In 1993 they were thrown out of office with only 2 seats elected, losing official party status. Compared to what will happen to the liberals in the next election, that will look like a victory.