Nation Energy Program, was a program mandated by the liberal government under Trudeau to “re-coup” some of the transfer payments to oil producing provinces to keep sky rocketing oil price low for the eastern manufacturing base. The problem was that it coincided with/led to one of the larger recessions in Canadian history and so has been linked, correctly or not, with the elimination of massive amounts of Albertan wealth.
Here’s how the party got its name. Up until 1942, it was just the Conservatives. They had suffered a bunch of leadership crises, and in 1942, asked the Premier of Manitoba, a guy named John Bracken, to become party leader.
The problem was that Bracken wasn’t a member of the party…he was a member of the Progressive Party of Manitoba. The Progressive Party of Manitoba was this farmers party that stressed non-partisanship, “good government”, and government reform. Bracken agreed, so long as the Conservatives changed their name, they did, and he did. Unfortunately, for them, the Manitoba Progressives stayed independent, and after the Progressive Party broke up, most of them joined the Liberals or what would go on to become the NDP.
No they didn’t. Or at least, that’s a misleading oversimplification. It would seem a bit of history is in order.
The Progressive Party of Canada was a western populist party founded in 1920, primarily on the basis of agricultural issues. It shares roots with some other farmer co-operative groups.
In 1942 the Conservative Party, one of the two historically dominant federal political parties in the country, was in dire straits after the disastrous government of R. B. Bennett during the Great Depression. They begged the Manitoba Premier John Bracken to accept leadership of the party. Bracken, who had led Manitoba at the head of the provincial Progressive Party for over 20 years and was one of very few elected leaders to survive the 30s with his job, accepted the Conservative leadership on the condition that the party’s name be changed to the Progressive Conservative Party.
From 1984-1993, the PCs held power with consecutive majority governments under Brian Mulroney. For various reasons several parts of the country were extremely peeved with the government by the end of its second term, and in 93 the Tories under newly selected leader Kim Campbell were wiped out at the ballot box, going from 169 seats to just 2. The party never recovered from 93, though it did “rebound” to win 20 seats in 97 and 12 in 2000.
One of the reasons for the demise of the federal Progressive Conservative Party was the formation of the Reform Party, another western populist party this time focusing on various issues cherished by Albertan conservatives who felt betrayed by Mulroney’s ignoring of western issues. Reform had swept up most of western conservative vote and becoming in 97 the Official Opposition. Many small-c conservatives were generally unhappy with the state of affairs, since Reform’s social conservative bent played rather poorly in Ontario and points east, but their national dominance over the federal PCs prevented the latter from making a national recovery. There was much talk of vote-splitting on the right. In 2000, an attempt by some to merge the PCs and Reform led to the creation of the Canadian Alliance, but most PCs declined to join the new party and the Alliance was doomed to be seen as simply a re-badged Reform Party. Finally in 2003 the two conservative parties managed to join forces under the auspices of yet another new party, this time called the Conservative Party of Canada. The choice of names was intelligent for a change, and the Conservatives quickly began being called the traditional nickname of the old Conservative and Progressive Conservative parties, Tories. They’ve managed this time to latch on to some of the (mixed) legacy and national legitimacy of the old Tories even though control of the party has remained mostly in the hands of old Reform people like Harper and John Reynolds.
Stating that “The Conservative Party in Canada used to call themselves the Progressive Conservative Party” completely overlooks the fact that Reform/Alliance makes up the majority of the Conservative Party and that the PCs were very much junior members in the merger, to the point where many saw it as a takeover by Reform rather than an actual merger. Such people would no doubt say something like “The Conservative Party in Canada used to call themselves the Canadian Alliance, and before that the Reform Party, until they absorbed the rump of the Progressive Conservatives.”