How did Jean ChrŽtien’s Liberal Party fare in Western Canada this past election? Many people might be surprised to hear that the answer, if history is a standard against which to judge the present, is: very, very well.
In the weeks since June 2, this is not the conventional wisdom that has settled in as post-election analysis sets the tone for the history books.
Some commentators have written about the Liberal “collapse” west of Ontario. One even talked about the Liberals being “shut out.”
When the new Parliament sits in September, Reform and the other Opposition parties can be expected to pick up the theme, challenging the government’s claim to speak for the West, since voters there so clearly rejected the Liberals.
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Lest this rhetoric become totally ingrained, there is some context worth remembering. The 14-member 1997 Liberal caucus in the new Parliament will be the third strongest in 40 years.
For only the third time in 14 elections over those 40 years, the elected Liberal caucus will have a voice from all four western provinces.
In vote counts, Liberals carried more than one in four Western votes, second only to Reform at 42 percent and well ahead of both the NDP and Progressive Conservatives – traditionally the parties of Western Canada.
And Reform, while winning the lion’s share of regional seats, fell far short of speaking for the majority of westerners, capturing more than 50 percent of the vote only in Alberta.
By almost any reckoning, ChrŽtien can honestly claim that he has done more to rebuild the Liberal Party in the West than any of his recent Liberal predecessors.
Louis St. Laurent squandered the Liberal position as the traditional political party of the west when he lost to Tory John Diefenbaker in 1957.
Lester Pearson, for all his acclaim as leader, could not rebuild it.
Pierre Trudeau, except for the “Trudeaumania” election of 1968, did no better and the fact that Liberal seats went from 27 seats in 1968 to seven in 1972 shows his success was a fluke of charisma.
John Turner will not be remembered as a party builder in any region.
Yet ChrŽtien took 28 seats in 1993 – the best showing since 1953 – and then proved it was no fluke by doing respectably again the next time.
Despite the claims of critics that the Liberals are a regional party, it can legitimately claim it speaks for the West as well as its power base in Ontario, parts of Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
None of this hides the fact that Liberal strength in the prairies was cut in half in the election.
It does not detract from Reform’s success in almost shutting the Liberals out of Saskatchewan and Alberta.
But it does challenge the conventional wisdom that ChrŽtien led the Liberals to disaster in the West.
In fact, he has been the most successful Liberal leader in the region in generations.
The 1997 result looks bad only in comparison to his extra-ordinary 1993 breakthrough.
