Elected To Office
Traditionally, the Progressive Party has been viewed as a western protest party, but some now contest this. It is certain that its core of support was western. But as the 1921 election shows, the Progressives began life as a truly national movement. The Progressives won 24 of the 81 House of Commons seats in Ontario. At the time, the party viewed this as a disappointing result. The Progressives received significant support in the Maritimes provinces as well, but only one seat in New Brunswick. At the provincial level, farmers' parties became significant presences in both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
By taking a very decentralized approach, the Progressive Party copied the method used in the United States to build a national party in the U.S. Congress.Crerar was not the national leader of the party, but only the parliamentary leader. The media regarded him as the leading spokesman of the party, although he had no official position outside of parliament. The party also had no national organization, relying instead on the Canadian Council of Agriculture to provide some degree of national structure. Each candidate was free to promote any policies they desired. Support for reforming the National Policy was a common denominator, but even this was not universal within the party. The Progressives can barely even be called a party, and many have argued that the term "Progressive Movement" is perhaps more apt.
In the 1921 election, the Liberal Party of Canada won the largest number of seats, and formed a minority government. The Progressives were divided over what to do, however. A significant group of ex-Liberals, including Crerar, supported forming a coalition government with the Liberals. This was resisted both by Montreal interests in the Liberal Party and the radical Progressives. Some radical Progressives, who were followers of Henry Wise Wood of the UFA, supported a very different strategy. They wished to remain a decentralized party with each member simply representing his constituents. The two groups agreed to refuse the position of Official Opposition, normally accorded to the party with the second largest number of seats, and this was passed on to the third-largest party, the Conservative Party.
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