The Liberals: Liberal Party

Liberals Dept: The Liberals were the classic middle-class party, although they had plenty of wealthy supporters and used to win more trade union votes than the NDP. The middle class, however, has been under tremendous financial squeeze. Its numbers are shrinking as income inequalities widen. The pressures on middle-class families make them want to keep more of what they earn, precisely the pitch Conservatives have successfully made to them, according to Globe and Mail. All these, and other, trends have been eating at the Liberal Party for a long time. Think of the chunks that have fallen away from the once-formidable Liberal coalition: francophones outside Quebec, many multicultural Canadians, blue-collar workers in the industrial cities of Ontario, federalist francophones in Quebec, Jews, Atlantic Canadians in cities such as St. John s, Halifax, Moncton and Saint John, the business Liberals from Toronto. It was an impressive coalition, malleable when necessary, mobilized around the broad ideas for which Liberals stood and liberals were the bridging party between Quebec and the rest of Canada, and between francophones and anglophones. Quebec has now faded from the consciousness of other Canadians, and vice versa. The relationship is so distant as to have become more mutually tolerable, so there s neither a crisis nor much interest in bridges, which means not much interest in a party that usually stood for a strong central government. Liberals were always the party of Canadian nationalism, but Conservatives are busy creating their own identification with historic, national symbols: the military, the monarchy, old wars and former Conservative prime ministers. And Canadian nationalism, which seemed to need nurturing for so long, has become ubiquitous, boisterous and self-confident, the property of no party any more. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.