Trasformismo - Trasformismo in Canada

Trasformismo in Canada

Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci's observations of Italian politics and history, Canadian historian Ian McKay has suggested that trasformismo has also played an important role in Canadian politics. The Macdonald-Cartier coalition, the basis of the Conservative Party which dominated Canadian federal politics for most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the Liberal Party which had dominated Canadian politics for the twentieth century, are portrayed as examples of a Canadian variant of trasformismo.

In the 1930s, Professor Frank H. Underhill of the University of Toronto also argued that Canada's two major political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, had operated in similar ways, advancing the same policies appealing to the same variety of sectional/regional and class interests. In doing so, Canada had perfected the two-party system and in doing so had marginalized liberalism and radicalism. The result, argued Underhill, was a pervasive poverty in Canadian political culture. Not coincidentally, Underhill was centrally involved in the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a farmer-labour coalition born during the Great Depression which became Canada's first successful federal third party, the labour-based New Democratic Party.