How the Conservative Party of Canada Came to Add ‘Progressive’ to Its Name in 1942

John Bracken makes his farewell speech at the Progressive Conservative leadership convention after resigning as leader, in Ottawa in 1948. CP Photo

Commentary

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.

The Progressives grew out of farmers’ protest movements in Ontario and the West. In Manitoba, they were an offshoot of the United Farmers of Manitoba. When the Progressive Party drafted Bracken after winning the July 18, 1922, election, they were improvising. He did not have much of a record to go on, had a “halting speaking manner,” and held the position of professor of field husbandry at the Manitoba Agricultural College.

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.

Bracken favoured the cause of farmers, while also striving to contain the growing power of organized labour in the shape of militant unions, which knowingly or unknowingly advanced the cause of Communist Party ideology in Canada. He is generally seen as a weak leader, but he did resist the 1934 miners’ strike in Flin Flon since, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, he believed they “were being led by Communist agitators.” It was true of course—anyone spewing the grossly exaggerated rhetoric of class warfare, instead of working for gradual, sensible reforms, was helping to weaken Canada’s social cohesion, a longstanding Communist Party objective.

In Ottawa, the last Conservative prime minister before the name change was R.B. Bennett. He had followed a “progressive” Depression-era policy of government programs similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s much-praised New Deal. But the Mackenzie King Liberal machine demonized Bennett for being a wealthy, self-made man, though King was himself rich enough.

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.

It was a mark of desperation to bring back former Prime Minister Arthur Meighen to the Conservative helm. He had held power in 1921 and 1925–26. A man known for putting principle ahead of political strategy, he reversed Manion’s anti-conscription policy, thus cutting off any chance of rebuilding the Tories’ Quebec wing. The sole French Canadian Tory MP, Joseph Sasseville Roy, quit the caucus.

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.

At that point, Meighen and other senior Conservatives thought it would be a good idea to draft Bracken as Conservative Party leader, though Meighen had met him personally only once. There was some political calculus behind it. As the longest-serving premier at the time, and a Westerner, Bracken could surely win back many lost Prairie votes to the Tories.

“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.

There was a minor controversy when the CBC refused to cover the Conservative Port Hope Conference on the grounds that political controversy should not be portrayed in time of war. Meighen attacked the CBC as “the effective monopoly, tool and instrument of a partisan Government” led by Mackenzie King. It was not the last time Conservatives thought that.

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.

True to the Conservative Party’s internecine tradition of destroying a new leader who fails them even once—known as the Tory Syndrome—the Conservatives began turning against Bracken immediately. His leadership never caught on. Some concluded they had chosen the wrong man, a “naive, ineffectual, featureless non-politician.” Others raised funds to offer him a guaranteed income if he quit, and by 1948 he was gone.

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.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.