The Canadian Citizenship Regime in a Conservative Era

Abstract

In the post-1945 decades the Canadian citizenship regime was constructed by a Liberal government, one that was in power for all but eight years of the four decades between 1944 and 1984, and which dominated the economic and social policy agenda. Its major rival were the Progressive Conservatives, a party that could win elections only when led by a populist leader or one with Red Tory credentials. In addition, in the key decades of the 1940s and the 1960s, when much innovation in social and economic policy occurred, the Liberals considered the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the self-styled social democrats of the New Democratic Party (NDP), to be a significant electoral threat. Finally, beginning in the 1940s in Saskatchewan and several other provinces from the 1960s on, a number of provincial party systems from Quebec westward included strong social democratic parties that were real contenders, and frequently in power. Indeed, by the 1960s, the progressive Quebec Liberal Party, with its plans for modernizing that province, was contributing major innovations to the regime, as Saskatchewan’s CCF had done previously and its NDP was still doing in that decade.