Can the Tories avoid the fate of Canada’s Conservatives?

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Wayne Hunt has narrated this article for you to listen to.

As the Conservatives edge closer to disaster in the general election, the hunt is on for a historical comparison. Tony Blair’s dispatching of John Major in 1997 was mild compared with what polls say could be in store. Those wondering how bad it could get should look to Canada in 1993, when a Conservative-majority government showed the world just how far it is possible to fall. The similarities are clear.

Brian Mulroney, the prime minister, had seemed to usher in a new conservative era when he was elected in 1984 with an unlikely coalition of voters. He had managed to cross Canada’s equivalent of a Red Wall by winning support in his native Quebec (French Canada had traditionally been the turf of the Liberals). But not enough was done to keep the voters on board. A recession led to cost-of-living pressure which was compounded by constitutional mayhem when Mulroney, sensing the inevitable, resigned in 1993.

Kim Campbell took charge and hoped to turn things around. She called an election close to the end of the party’s five-year parliamentary term. But a new centre-right party had emerged, calling itself Reform. It was populist, bold, brash, socially conservative and influenced by the Christian right. It took aim at a myopic political class and its message to voters was that it was time to vote down a tired consensus that did not move, either physically or imaginatively, out of the nation’s capital. When the election was called, Reform was at about 12 per cent in the polls. Almost identical, in fact, to Richard Tice’s Reform party in Britain today.

Canada’s establishment is sometimes called the ‘Laurentian elite’ (after the Laurentian mountains in Quebec), and they tended to be oblivious to those outside their bourgeois Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal bubble.