When did we get so divided ?
Some of you who have more seas under their keel than I may know more but I dont remember a time when we were so divided as a country. I feel like when I was growing up Libs and PCs could talk, compromise and work together...
Am I living in a fantasy land ?
I know it's a rhetorical question, but 1947 would be a good place to start. In the USA ~ from whence most Canadians get most of their ideas: good and bad ~ some liberal politicians (Republicans who are now called conservatives because the US media and intelligentsia have totally lost the ability to use the English language) wanted to repeal the New Deal. It was, they felt, government overreach which may have been necessary, as a stop-gap measure in the 1930s but was too much "government" for a liberal nation.
In Canada there was the first skirmish of a civil war inside the
Liberal Party on socio-economic policy that lasts to this day. The Big Government Liberals won the day. A similar civil war shook the
Conservative Party in Canada, too. Diefenbaker was, mainly, a liberal but he faced a Big Government caucus.
By 1964, in America, Barry Goldwater campaigned on formally renouncing and dismantling most of the New Deal and the "New Right" was born. Goldwater lost.
But the divisions in US social and political thought were clear and firm ... and they seeped, slowly at first, and then swept across the border into Canada.
Québec, as always, was and remains the least liberal political jurisdiction in North America and it helped to push and keep the
Liberal Party in the Big Government/illiberal camp. The
Conservatives were, under Brian Mulroney, equally committed to Big Government and it took
Parson Preston Manning to really bring American style neo-liberalism into Canada. Stephen Harper was/is a neo-liberal. It is not clear to me where Pierre Poilievre and other would-be leadership sit on the
liberal - neo-liberal - Conservative -
Liberal - illiberal - autocratic spectrum.