As the likelihood grows of a seismic shift in U.K. politics after elections that must be held later this year, many commentators in London are struggling to come to terms with the fact that the ruling Conservative Party, which has dominated the country’s political landscape for the past 14 years, is now on the brink of collapse. With the opposition Labour Party regularly racking up 20-point leads in opinion polls, analysts have looked back to previous defeats suffered by the Tories in 1997 or 1945 as parallels for what’s in store. Yet as the Tories hurtle toward what is now expected to be an extinction-level event, some observers have looked further afield in search of a fitting precedent for the total collapse of a once-dominant conservative party: Canada’s general elections of 1993.
When examined from a distance, the catastrophic defeat suffered in those elections by the Progressive Conservative Party, which took it from 169 seats in Canada’s Parliament to just two, looks like an apt cautionary tale of how a party can stumble into disaster. In Canada 30 years ago, the Progressive Conservatives’ political collapse represented a culmination of public frustration that had been building over half a decade, in response to economic stagnation and a sense of permanent institutional crisis. Allegations of corruption further damaged the party’s reputation for competent economic management and constitutional competence, leading to a fracturing of its voter coalitions.
The parallels with the U.K.’s Conservative Party today are obvious. Yet for all the similarities, both cases were also shaped by unique local pressures.
By late 2022, the Tory Party’s reputation was already suffering from the twin legacies of austerity-driven attempts to shrink the state and the Brexit-driven rupture of relations with the European Union. The scandals surrounding the management of the COVID-19 pandemic under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson followed by former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s brief but economically disastrous stint in office only compounded a wider sense of national crisis.
By contrast, the demise of the Progressive Conservatives in Canada was fueled by infighting in the 1980s over reforms to the country’s distinct constitutional order in the face of separatism in the province of Quebec and regional discontent in Alberta. Those divisions also paralyzed efforts to mitigate the impact of the global recession of the early 1990s.
Then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s efforts to fully integrate Quebec, with its French-speaking majority, into Canada’s constitutional order only alienated Quebecois nationalists, who considered them inadequate. They also angered Mulroney’s political supporters in the western Canadian province of Alberta, who condemned what they viewed as pandering that sold out their regional interests. Having already provoked fury among Canada’s Indigenous peoples, whose sense of neglect escalated into armed violence in 1990, Mulroney’s ambitions to resolve Canada’s constitutional tensions ended with the collapse of his fragile voter coalition.
On the surface, there are some similarities between the constitutional mess that Mulroney maneuvered himself into in the 1980s and the visceral disputes over the Brexit process before and after the U.K. formally left the EU in 2021. Yet the attempt to reach out to Quebec nationalists through a reform of Canada’s constitution was very much a personal project of Mulroney’s, himself a native of Quebec, rather than a goal shared by much of the Canadian political right in other provinces. By contrast, for the post-Brexit Tory Party, decoupling from the EU has become a deeply embedded ideological project shared by most MPs and party members, even as all the evidence in opinion polls indicates that a wide majority of the U.K. electorate below the age of 65 has shifted toward a more pro-EU stance.
Similarly, when it comes to economic and tax policies, many of the ideological dilemmas facing the U.K.’s Tory Party now are more intractable than the challenges the Canadian right had to grapple with after 1993. Despite his neoliberal rhetoric, Mulroney carefully kept the foundations of Canada’s universal health care and social welfare systems in place. As a consequence, when the Canadian right re-emerged in the early 2000s, its commitment to lower taxes had not been discredited in the eyes of Canadian voters. By contrast, the austerity-driven social damage inflicted by the Tory Party’s ideological fixation on shrinking the state has over time alienated much of the U.K. electorate.
The comparison between Canadian politics in the early 1990s and British politics in the 2020s reveals a structural paradox with implications for how quickly the Tories might recover from a catastrophic defeat later this year.
Alongside these issues of ideology and policy, perhaps the most important contrast between 1990s Canada and the U.K. in the 2020s is how the collapse of Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives was also driven by the emergence of an electorally viable alternative for voters on the center right in Preston Manning’s Reform Party. Building on longstanding ideological networks that had flourished both within the Progressive Conservatives as well as through powerful provincial parties, such as the Social Credit movement, Reform gained 52 seats in 1993 and ensured that the Canadian political right had a strong presence in Parliament throughout the 1990s. Over time, the strength of the Reform Party enabled a merger with the remnants of the Progressive Conservatives to create a Conservative Party that absorbed the latter’s brand and the former’s ideology and style, making both more palatable to centrist voters in central and eastern Canada.
Not coincidentally, the successor party to Nigel Farage’s now-defunct UKIP and Brexit Party vehicles is also called Reform, but its ability to reproduce its erstwhile Canadian counterpart’s exploits by taking control of right-wing politics in the U.K. remains doubtful. Farage and other figures around the Reform project are wedded to Brexit and “small state” policies that no longer appeal to much of the U.K. electorate. As a result, they are likely to struggle as much as their Tory counterparts when it comes to reviving wider support for right-wing politics in England, Wales and Scotland. By contrast, several of Manning’s successors in Canada, including former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and current Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, have displayed a knack for ditching electorally inconvenient policy stances—on the constitution and public services, for instance—while still churning out populist rhetoric that keeps their base happy.
When examined more closely, the comparison between Canadian politics in the early 1990s and British politics in the 2020s reveals a remarkable structural paradox with implications for how quickly the Tories might recover from a catastrophic defeat later this year. While the Progressive Conservatives experienced a brutal electoral disaster in 1993, the wider Canadian right had the space to abandon unpopular constitutional projects and revive support for “small state” ideology. By contrast, even if the Tory Party survives with a few dozen MPs after the next U.K. election, its members—as well as its rivals in Farage’s Reform project—may find it more difficult to abandon unpopular ideological fixations and avoid vicious infighting, both of which would stand in the way of a viable pathway toward political recovery.
Even as the Tory Party drifts ever closer to electoral disaster, the turmoil that overwhelmed Canadian politics in the early 1990s also serves as a warning for what might lie in store for the Labour Party, which looks poised to take power. Though the 1993 election led to a solid victory for Canada’s Liberal Party, it also enabled resurgent Quebec separatists—who also took control of Quebec’s provincial government in 1994 —to gain a strong presence in the Canadian Parliament. In the years that followed, then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien and the rest of the Liberal leadership barely avoided defeat in the 1995 referendum over Quebec’s independence, consuming his government’s focus at a time when Canada’s economic recovery was still fragile.
Under Keir Starmer, whose uncharismatic leadership style resembles that of Chretien, a newly installed Labour government will face even greater crises of economic growth and state capacity, while struggling to prevent a resurgence of Scottish nationalism that could prove every bit as challenging as Quebecois separatism was for Ottawa in the 1990s.
As with any comparative case study, the differences between Canadian politics in the 1990s with developments in the U.K. three decades later are as revealing as the similarities. For the Tory Party, the aftermath of the collapse of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party reveals how arduous the process of recovery from such an electoral disaster can be. And for a U.K. Labour Party on the verge of taking power after 14 years in opposition, the challenges that Canada’s Liberals faced after that fateful election of 1993 show that the toughest struggles always begin after victory.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.