Divided Loyalties: The Liberal Party of Canada, 1984–2008 (review)

The election of May 2011 was not a good one for the Liberal Party of Canada: rejected even as the Official Opposition, the party was reduced to only thirty-four mps and received less than 20 per cent of the popular vote. Leaderless after Michael Ignatieff’s hasty resignation in the wake of the poor results, the ‘government party’ of the twentieth century had become little more than an afterthought in the minds of Canadian voters. Commentators were soon predicting the total collapse of the party and, in the words of the long-time political observer Peter C. Newman, the ‘death of Liberal Canada.’

There is little doubt that the Liberal Party is in unfamiliar territory. Having formed the national government for about 70 per cent of the twentieth century, the Liberals had established an approach to both party politics and governing that were intertwined and, some would argue, barely distinguishable. Under Laurier, strong ties to the provinces, an unerring eye for compromise, and the judicious use of patronage built the Liberal brand; King centralized power in the federal government while maintaining the ideological pragmatism of the earlier period; Pearson and then Trudeau secured the identification of the party with the social and justice ideals of the left, even if the party itself moved no further in that direction than it ever had; under Chrétien, the government’s fiscal restraint and sound economic management added deficit-slaying to an already full arsenal of ideas and ideologies at the Liberals’ disposal. By the end of the century, the Liberal juggernaut was securely positioned in the broad middle of the Canadian political landscape.

In addition to the core features of the Liberal Party as they were articulated and redefined over the course of the twentieth century, there were a number of features that seemed somehow to be a part of the magic that kept them in office. Chief among those were the habit of alternating leaders between French and English Canada – an unplanned strategy that simply seemed the norm after moving from Edward Blake to Laurier to King to St Laurent – and the strong tradition of supporting the leader through good times and bad. The combination of the two established the party as capable of bridging Canada’s two solitudes, and profoundly united in its approach to government. That these two features of Liberal Party management were also more easily undertaken from positions of government than from the wilderness of Opposition – or worse – did not feature prominently in the Liberal narrative.

Brooke Jeffrey brings a unique perspective to what happened to the government party at the end of the twentieth century. A party insider – a director of the Liberal Caucus Research Bureau, a member of the 1988 National Campaign Committee, and a Liberal candidate in the 1993 election – but also an academic, her analysis includes the hallmarks of both access and probity. Divided Loyalties is a meticulous – at more than 600 pages, one might be excused for thinking too detailed – yet compelling tale of the Liberal odyssey from the leadership convention that selected John Turner in 1984 through the Liberal election loss in 2008 under Stephan Dion’s leadership. It is a period during which all of the former rules of Liberal play seemed forgotten: virtually from the moment of his election over the somehow more personable Jean Chrétien, Turner was a marked man, facing repeated internal threats to his leadership. When Chrétien replaced him in 1990, his chief competitor was the much less experienced Quebecker Paul Martin. Martin continued to be a thorn in the side of first Liberal Leader and then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, despite also being a valuable part of the Chrétien team as the finance minister who put Canada’s economic house in order. It was a complicated relationship, but one that ultimately resulted in virtually open warfare, with the Martin supporters largely responsible for Chrétien’s resignation from the...