Data and Results: Intraparty Linkages

Rand Dyck (1996) provides a framework for understanding the character of intra-party institutional linkages across the federal-provincial divide in Canada, updated in Table 6.1. Importantly for Hi, Dyck (1996) notes the ten­dency for linkages among non-New Democratic Party (ndp) parties to decline over time.

The former national Progressive Conservative Party (one precursor of the cur­rent Conservatives) shared few or no formal linkages to provincial parties from its founding in 1942 until its demise in 2003. The national level Conservative Party formed in 2004 from the merger of the Progressive Conservative (pc) and Canadian Alliance parties has no organizational links to provincial parties, although there are clear personnel linkages with provincial right-wing parties. This includes provincial Progressive Conservative Parties, the Saskatchewan Party, the newly formed United Conservative Party that now governs Alberta (2019) and perhaps the upstart Coalition Avenir Quebec, which holds govern­ment in Quebec (since 2018) along with several provincial pc parties.

The message is more mixed for the Liberals. The party remained relatively integrated until the 1970s, when its federal and provincial counterparts began to decouple. About half (five) of federal-provincial Liberal party relationships

table 6.1 Character of federal-provincial intra-party linkages by major party

Key: ndp = New Democratic Party; Lib = Liberal; Party Con= Various Conservative Parties. Mixed is a combination of yes and no.

source: adapted from DYCK 1996.

might be classified as either integrated or somewhat integrated. The nd? remains the only relatively integrated party, with the exception of Quebec, where the provincial party once collapsed. A provincial New Democratic Party reformed in Quebec in 2016, but the federal nd? leader refused to endorse the party in the 2018 election.

Patterns of partisan competition across the provinces are very distinctive (Stewart, Sayers, and Carty 2015). Linkages between parties of the same name across provincial lines generally follow the same rank order, but at a substan­tially reduced level. Even the nd? is not immune to the competitive effects of Canadian federalism on linkages between provincial parties, despite its ten­dency to share personnel. The very sharp dispute between the nd? govern­ments of British Columbia and Alberta over the expansion of the interprovin­cial Trans-Mountain Pipeline are a case in point.¹¹

A word of caution is required here. Despite often limited formal vertical linkages, patterns of personal interaction remain strong, with activists often working for a party of the same name or similar ideological disposition in fed­eral and provincial elections and also offering financial support (see, for exam­ple, Koop 2011).

1