In The News is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to kickstart your day. Here is what's on the radar of our editors for the morning of June 2.
By Mark Wegierski web posted May 3, 2021
“Third parties” are an endlessly fascinating topic of study for political theorists. The notion of “third party” arises in polities characterized by “first-past-the-post” voting systems, where there are usually only two major parties. Polities characterized by proportional representation (PR) voting systems, tend to have a multiplicity of parties. Particular popular attention – although scant electoral support is given to “third parties” in the U.S. – where the “two-party” system is so strongly entrenched. Since the 1850s, with the rise of the Republican Party, there have been two main parties in the U.S. – although both of them have undergone tremendous permutations. Since that time, there has never been in U.S. politics, a “third party” which achieved the electoral breakthroughs that a considerable number of “third parties” have been able to do in Canada. It is quite fascinating to study
By Mark Wegierski web posted April 5, 2021
There have been throughout Western Canada’s history a number of regionalist or outrightly separatist parties that are usually considered as being on the fringe. These have included, among others, the Western Canada Concept, West-Fed, and so forth. The Social Credit Party (based loosely on the ideas of C. H. Douglas) was a right-wing populist party that arose in response to the Great Depression. It held the governments of Alberta and British Columbia at various times. Preston Manning’s father, Ernest C. Manning, was the long-time Social Credit Premier of Alberta. The term “retread Socreds” was one of the labels circulated about Preston Manning’s Reform Party. Nevertheless, Manning was in some ways more of a successor to the Progressive Party of the 1920s to 1940s. The remarkable electoral insurgency of the Progressive Party was able at one point to win the second-largest number of seats in the federal Parliament, but the