Party Membership on the Canadian Political Right: The Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Parties

Abstract

The upheaval on the Canadian political right in the past decade is well documented (Carty 2000; Woolstencroft 2001; Ellis 2001). Today, the two parties of the right, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, continue to compete against each other for the support of right-of-centre voters. One result of this electoral fracturing of the political right is the three-straight majority victories won by the Liberal Party.2 Not surprisingly, Liberal Party opponents have spent much of the last decade seeking a reunification of the right as an important first step in an electoral coalescing of enough of the government’s opponents to defeat it. Much of the attention paid to the question of uniting the right has concerned the machinations of party leaders and other elites. Which parliamentary caucus are Alliance party dissidents aligning with? Will the new Alliance leader favour electoral cooperation with the Conservatives? Will the Conservative leader seek a meaningful partnership with the Alliance? While all of these are important considerations, they ignore the role that the grassroots supporters of both parties, and particularly the activist core found in the parties’ memberships, will play in any attempt at unification or electoral cooperation.