Social Structure and Canadian Political Parties: the Quebec Case

• Date: 01 December 1956
• Published date: 01 December 1956
• DOI: 10.1177/106591295600900407
• Subject Matter: Articles

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND CANADIAN
POLITICAL PARTIES: THE QUEBEC CASE*
WALTER O. FILLEY
Wesleyan University
HE
TARDY
recognition that political parties are in no small measure
~ outgrowths of a particular social subsoil is spurring more intensive
exploration of this facet of comparative politics. In the search for
broad hypotheses concerning the relationship between social structure and
parties, there is need for close examination of a wide range of individual
cases which sift the unique elements from those of more universal validity.
While many studies of this kind will properly focus on entire societies, for
others it may be fruitful to subject a more limited area to intensive analysis.
In Canada the province of Quebec, with its preponderantly French-speak-
ing population, provides a singularly appropriate unit for research in the
sociology of political parties.
THE KEYSTONE PROVINCE
For much of the past sixty years, Quebec has occupied a pivotal position
in Canadian politics. With but a single exception in that period,’ no party
has attained a parliamentary majority without securing at least 40 per cent
of Quebec’s fixed quota of seats in the House of Commons. Twice since
1896 (in 1911 and 1930) the Conservatives have accomplished that feat:
in all other federal elections since that date, Quebec has served the Liberals
as their principal springboard to office at Ottawa
2
This remarkable fidelity to one party, now almost a constant in
Canadian politics, can be traced to no single cause. Of surpassing im-
portance, however, has been the reputation acquired by the Liberals as the
national party most likely to further the goals of the French Canadians, who
The research underlying this paper was made possible by grants from Wesleyan Uni-
versity and the Social Science Research Council.
1
The "conscription election" of 1917 which swept into power the coalition Union Cabinet
of Sir Robert Borden despite the fact that its candidates carried only three Quebec
seats, all in heavily English-Canadian constituencies, was a complete anomaly.
2
In these years the number of Liberals elected from Quebec was:
900

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901
comprise four-fifths of that province’s population and almost one-third
of that of the country. Quebec, to be sure, is not synonymous with French
Canada, for within the province lives a substantial English-speaking
minority, while outside its borders are to be found over one million French-
speaking individuals. In recognition, however, of the strategic political in-
fluence wielded by the Canadiens of the lower St. Lawrence, province and
nationality will be used as interchangeable terms.
The apparent invincibility of the Liberals in Quebec has given rise to
doubts that their last national defeat can be re-enacted. In the light of the
persistent three-way fragmentation of the parliamentary Opposition, any
party posing as a potential replacement falls far short of the seats needed to
form a Government.3 Yet Quebec, most tradition-minded as well as most
politically static among Canada’s provinces, is undergoing a many-sided
transformation whose political implications have as yet been only super-
ficially probed.- In the present analysis the interstices of Quebec’s social
and political systems will be explored to ascertain the manner in which
its political parties on the f ederal level have been or in the future may be
influenced by French Canada’s changing social structure. Objection may
rightly be made that Quebec is neither a typical province nor reliable as a
political barometer area. But in population and in its quota of seats in the
House of Commons it stands second only to Ontario. Any significant
alteration in its electoral behavior is thus more likely to shift the balance
of political forces for the entire country than would any current of change
springing up in the more volatile but less populous Western provinces, to
date the seed-bed of Canada’s third parties.
THE POLITICAL PANORAMA IN QUEBEC
The parties vying for Quebec’s federal seats have customarily been
provincial branches of national political organizations. Five elections be-
tween 1935 and 1953 have produced no major fluctuations in the relative
standing of the four durable parties in the House of Commons: a Liberal
majority ranging from 125 to 190 seats, a Conservative total varying be-
tween 39 and 67, and an aggregate figure for the two smaller parties -
the
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or C.C.F. (democratic Socialists,
chiefly from the West) and Social Credit (a crypto-conservative movement
3
As a result of the federal elections of August 10, 1953, the party standings in the House
of Commons were: Liberals, 171; Progressive Conservatives, 51; Co-operative Com-
monwealth Federation, 23; Social Credit, 15; others, 5.
4
Social scientists have already examined intensively the effects of industrialization upon
Quebec’s social order. See Horace Miner, St. Denis, A French Canadian Parish
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Everett C. Hughes, French Canada in
Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); and Jean-Charles Falardeau
(ed.), Essais sur le Québec contemporain (Quebec, Les Presses Universitaires, 1953).
In his monumental study, The French Canadians 1760-1945 (New York: The
Macmillan Co., 1954), Mason Wade has broached this subject to World War II.

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902
centered in Alberta and British Columbia) -
which has yet to equal that
of the Conservatives. In contrast to this much modified or even concealed
multiparty system,5 political competition in Quebec has remained almost
entirely within the familiar Liberal and Conservative stream beds.
The Conservatives, for twenty years after Confederation in 1867 the
dominant party in that province, proceeded to alienate much of their
support by policy decisions and declarations which, as seen by French
Canadians, embodied hostility to that nationality or excessively emotional
loyalty to Great Britain before Canada. The most corrosive resentment
stemmed from English Canadian insistence (voiced chiefly through the
Conservative party) upon conscription for military service overseas in both
world wars. This demand, regarded by Canadiens as a crass form of domi-
nation by the majority nationality, seared lasting scars upon their political
memorieS.6 Aside from a short-lived recovery in the depression contest of
1930, the Conservatives have won no more than 35 per cent of the votes
cast in Quebec or five of its seats in Commons in any post-1917 federal
election. The price paid for estrangement of a large part of the French-
speaking electorate7 would be difficult to exaggerate.
The essential principle that Canada can only be governed with the
participation of its French-speaking citizens was grasped with unerring
instinct by Sir John A. Macdonald, first and most eminent among Con-
servative leaders. In this century, however, the Liberals have pre-empted
this axiom and implemented it by consistently alloting a substantial propor-
tion of ranking party and cabinet posts to French Canadians, two of whom
(Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Louis St. Laurent) have reached the twin
pinnacles of party leadership and the prime minister’s office. Largely in
return for such assurance that their views would at least be weighed in
major policy decisions on the national level, the voters of French Canada
have demonstrated an overwhelming preference for the Liberal party.
5
See the discussion of the possible lines of evolution of the Canadian party system in the
Canadian Forum: Seymour Lipset, "Democracy in Alberta," Canadian Forum, XXXIV
(November, 1954), 175-77 and (December, 1954), 196-98; C. B. Macpherson, "Democ-
racy in Alberta: A Reply," ibid., XXXIV (January, 1955), 223-25; and Walter Filley,
"The Conservative Impasse," ibid., XXXV (April, 1955), 1 and 9-10.
6
The principal episodes which evoked these Conservative positions included the Riel
Rebellions of 1870-71 and 1885, the South African War, the Naval Bill of 1911, and the
Ontario School Controversy. On the conscription controversy see E. H. Armstrong,
The Crisis of Quebec, 1914-17 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937) ; also
Wade, op. cit., pp. 708-77.
7
The Conservative percentage of the popular vote in Quebec in federal elections, 1921-53,
was
as follows:
Figures for 1921-49 are from John R. Williams, The Conservative Party of Canada
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1956), p. 154.

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903
On the periphery of the party system, neither fully participating nor
totally abstaining, has hovered Quebec’s Nationalist movement. At some
point in life nearly every Canadien imbibes the heady elixir of nationalism,
a psychological residue of British conquest in 1763. Only a small and self-
conscious intellectual vanguard, including sincere idealists along with
doctrinaires and demagogues, has promulgated the idea of a race vaingue
living in actual or imminent danger of cultural extinction and political
subservience.8 Scornful of French candidates in the major parties as pliant
compromisers prone to barter away Quebec’s interests, these Nationalists
have rarely been able to band together to form a party of their own. Still
less frequently have they elected more than isolated Independents from
rural ridings as their mouthpieces.9 Only in provincial politics has a party
of this sort (the Union Nationale...