Gail Campbell, who has been studying the origins of politics in the 19th century Maritime provinces, has a sharp little essay at Acadiensis online in which she notes that much political history in the academy these days tends to lump the two major Canadian parties together as generically neoliberal.
In recent years, the analysis of Canadian political history has tended to drift away from a nuanced analysis of party politics and toward a more general, often confusing overview that conflates the two major parties into a single ideological framework. At best, Canada’s system is discussed in terms of ‘brokerage politics’ with two ‘big tent’ parties, each with a small loyal core, vying for the same supporters. This situation has, according to a widely held view, resulted in the triumph of ‘neoliberal policies’, for which we can read ‘Capitalism’. The problem with this characterisation is its narrow economic focus and lack of sophisticated analytical framework or theoretical perspective. It tends to originate in and reflect a dismissive condemnation of both major parties.She notes that responses to the Covid-19 crisis in Canada undermine this analysis:
While the country’s only NDP government invests in ordinary Canadians who are at risk of losing their jobs in the face of a changing, and changed, world, and the federal Liberals invest in those same Canadian workers as well as in small and medium-sized Canadian businesses struggling to retain and support their workers as they adapt to their own changing and changed circumstances, Conservatives on both levels of government remain firm in the belief that big business, not big government, is the best guarantor of economic recovery. These approaches surely reflect significant differences in ideology, as well as in approach.It all leaves her a little sceptical about the influential "liberal order framework" analysis, which:
while broad and ambitious in its conceptualisation, also promotes a dismissive approach towards analysis or even consideration of the ideological differences between the two political parties that had emerged by the 1850s.
Update, July 8: Helen Webberley comments from Australia:
"Conservatives on both levels of government remain firm in the belief that big business, not big government, is the best guarantor of economic recovery”. What a tragic belief to hold, in Canada of all places ☹. At least your blog post’s heading is cute.
