The rise and fall of the New Brunswick CoR party, 1988-1995.

• Author: Martin, Geoffrey R.

This article traces the rise and fall of one of Canada's recently formed populist, "New right" parties, the Confederation of Regions Party of New Brunswick. It shows how and why the party was formed and why it collapsed in the last provincial election. COR-NB was a programmatic party based on political protest, which advocated a libertarian ideology. The article argues that partisan realignment is possible in "traditional" areas like New Brunswick, but that the anger that led to the formation of the party eventually turned inward and destroyed the party's coherence.

**********

On September 11, 1995, the saga of the Confederation of Regions Party of New Brunswick (COR-NB) ended, when the party received 7% of the votes and no seats in the provincial election This represented a major collapse of a party, which in the 1991 provincial election polled 87,256 votes (21% of the total), took 8 seats, and the position of Official Opposition in the Legislative Assembly. As it turned out, COR-NB's success in 1991 took place in a "populist moment" in New Brunswick politics, in which a number of factors came together to enable a new party, which rejected "Official Bilingualism" and many of the basic principles of the political system, to achieve significant success in a province with almost no tradition of third-party activity. COR's collapse in the recent election shows that this populist moment has passed, along with the other factors that made for COR-NB's success. For the forseeable future New Brunswick politics has returned to its historic pattern of two-party competition among small-c conservative elites.

The COR Party of New Brunswick

COR NB was formed in 1989, less than two years after the "McKenna sweep" of 1987, in which the Liberal Party under Frank McKenna won every single seat in the legislature. In the 1991 election, COR-NB won its seats in the South and Central parts of the province, and its support was also disproportionately in rural, sparsely populated areas. COR took advantage of the voters' underlying concern about bilingualism. It did this chiefly in the former heartland of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party.

There are five central points that describe the party's platform and principles.

* The party was, first of all, a programmatic party, not a brokerage party. It had a fixed programme which its activists were unwilling to compromise.

* Second, it was a protest party with roots in a single issue, that of "Official Bilingualism." The party was essentially an "ethnic party" representing a segment of English New Brunswick which was extremely dissatisfied, to the point of anger, over the direction of public policy in the province and the country. (1)

* Third, like Social Credit in Alberta, COR-NB was a populist party and it placed high priority on changing the system in addition to changing specific public policies. This populism was represented most significantly in the inversion of the political hierarcy: For COR activists, elected members were responsible to the Electorate first, then the Party, and only finally the Leader.

* Fourth, ideologically the party is "classical liberal" in the nineteenth century sense, which today is best referred to as libertarian.

* Fifth and finally, like Social Credit in the past, in class terms the COR Party is petty bourgeois and lower-middle class in its orientation.

This final point is important and too often neglected, and is also relevant to other Canadian political experiments, especially the Reform Party of Canada. In its heyday the COR Party was dominated by middle-income and small-business people, professionals, and the self-employed. The middle class is the backbone of advanced...