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Party members elect the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the head and highest-ranking member of the party. Liberal Democrat members of Parliament also elect a deputy leader of the Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons , often colloquially referred to as the deputy leader.
- Overview
- History
Liberal Party of Canada, centrist Canadian political party, one of the major parties in the country since the establishment of the Dominion of Canada in 1867. The Liberal Party has been the governing party at the federal level for most of the period since the late 1890s, bringing together pragmatic social policy reformers and advocates of free ente...
The Liberal Party originated in the reformist opposition groups that emerged in the mid-19th century in what are now the provinces of Quebec and Ontario—“Rouges” (Reds) in the former and Clear Grits in the latter. The looseness and instability of all party formations at the time were especially persistent on what came to be called the Liberal side.
Both before and after the 1867 creation of the Canadian federation, the Conservatives under Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, were more successful than the Liberals in forging a durable coalition. In 1873 Alexander Mackenzie did become the first Liberal prime minister, but his parliamentary group was undisciplined and lacked policy coherence. The party was swept from office in 1878, largely because of its support for unpopular free-trade policies. In 1887 Wilfrid Laurier assumed the Liberal leadership and was able to unify the party around a centrist platform and bridge the linguistic and regional divisions that had previously fragmented the party. Laurier became the country’s first French Canadian prime minister in 1896 and held power until 1911.
William Lyon Mackenzie King became party leader in 1919 and two years later was elected prime minister, a position he retained for all but five years until his retirement in 1948. Under his leadership, the Liberals had some success in mediating French-English and regional differences, and, by fashioning pragmatic centrist policies that included some social reforms, the party was able to draw votes from a growing social democratic constituency without diminishing its business support.
Louis Saint Laurent replaced Mackenzie King as party leader in 1948 and served as prime minister until the Liberals’ defeat in 1957 by the Progressive Conservative Party. Saint Laurent oversaw significant expansion of the welfare state in his early years, but the party also retained pro-business policies and a complacent attitude toward increased economic integration with the United States. Led by Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Lester Pearson, the Liberals narrowly regained power in 1963. They once again expanded social insurance programs, introducing a comprehensive national health-care system. Pearson’s government also sought to accommodate the growing nationalist movement in Quebec, allowing the province to opt out of some federal programs and extending the recognition of official bilingualism in federal government operations.
Pierre Trudeau, who had been an elected politician for only a few years, replaced Pearson as party leader in 1968 and was prime minister for all but a brief period in 1979–80 until his retirement from federal politics in 1984. Trudeau turned away from the party’s previous attempts to accommodate Quebecers’ desire for special status in the federation in favour of policies reflecting a Canadian nationalist wariness of American domination. He also focused attention on the defense of individual rights, engineering in 1982 the inclusion of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian constitution. Nevertheless, the party was swept from office in 1984 by the Progressive Conservatives, a defeat fueled by an overall shift to the right and the intensification of discontent in Quebec and western Canada with the Liberal government’s record.
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- David Rayside
16 de jul. de 2015 · 16 July 2015. The Liberal Democrats name their new leader on Thursday. Either Tim Farron or Norman Lamb will follow in the footsteps of some distinguished and colourful figures, who have led...
17 de ene. de 2012 · Liberals have formed numerous governments and provided Canada with 10 prime ministers, but the party has also experienced defeat and internal divisions. In the election of October 2015, the party rose from third to first place in the House of Commons, winning a majority government under leader Justin Trudeau.
The Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau since 2013, won a majority government in the 2015 federal election. In both the federal elections of 2019 and 2021, the party was re-elected with a minority government.
27 de sept. de 2021 · Six potential Liberal leaders who could follow Justin Trudeau — and a few long shots. The last time it faced a situation like this, the Liberal Party nearly broke itself in half between the...
Liberal Leadership. Justin was elected Leader of the Liberal Party in April 2013. His leadership campaign focused on building a new, truly national movement of progressive Canadians, bringing hundreds of thousands of Canadians into politics, most for the first time.
