Peter C. Newman seems to have originated a famous meme of Canadian politics by quoting Jack Pickersgill, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, Liberal cabinet minister, historian, and literary executor of William Lyon Mackenzie King’s estate. In 1968, Newman quoted Pickersgill as having referred to the Liberal Party of Canada as “The Government Party.”[1] But by 2010 and 2011 in his later books, Newman quoted Pickersgill as having called the Liberals as “the natural government party” (Newman’s emphasis),[2] and Canadian politicos since at least 1991 have often referred to the Liberals by a slightly different variant, as “the natural governing party” (my emphasis).[3]

• The Liberal Half-Century

Whether the phrase be “The Government Party,” “the natural government party”, or “the natural governing party,” it ultimately flows from the general election of 1935, which marked the beginning of twenty-two years of uninterrupted Liberal rule and started the Conservative Party’s descent into infighting and irrelevance in the mid-20^th century. The 49 years from 1935 to 1984 saw the Liberals in government for fully 42 years, 7 months, and 15 days, punctuated by the erratic, mercurial 5 years and 9 months of John Diefenbaker from 1957 to 1963 and the even less consequential 9 months of the innumerate and complacent Joseph Clark in 1979 and 1980. That amounts to 86.63% of that period. In other words, the Conservatives only managed to stay in office for a mere 6 years and 7 months, or merely 13.37% of that time. This half-century of defeat and incompetence seared into the psyche of several generations of federal Conservative politicians and only began to fade in the 21^st century.

Since 1984, however, the Conservatives have done much better at being in government and in creating a semblance of democratic alternation in Canada; between the fall of 1984 and the end of 2024, the Liberals formed government for about 21 years and 5 months compared to 18 years and 10 months for the Conservatives. The Liberals have still governed for longer during these forty-odd years, but not in ratio so lopsided as that of the previous fifty. But Mark Carney managed to pull off the John Turner Manoeuvre in April 2025 and led the Liberals to a large plurality just shy a majority in the House of Commons after doing an about-face on many of Justin Trudeau’s policies; as the National Post declared on 28 April 2025, the “Liberal prove [that] they’re the ‘natural governing party’ after all.”[4] The wound in the Conservative psyche might never full heal either.

Perhaps Pickersgill’s original quote evolved once Newman turned it loose on the public in 1963 from “the government party” into “the natural governing party” in the same way that the dialogue of The Empire Strikes Back has suffered from imprecise recall and faulty memories. Vader in fact said to Luke, “No. I am your father,” but the meme has converged upon an inaccurate quote (“Luke, I am your father”) that nevertheless reasonably summarises the significance of the scene. Similarly, while no character ever uttered the line of mimetic fame “Beam me up, Scotty!” in Star Trek: The Original Series, nor in any of the six feature films centered on the original cast, what the characters in fact said comes close enough to the meme that it still summarises the idea reasonably. Once Pickersgill’s quote became a meme of Canadian politics, it morphed into something slightly different. The Government Party of 1968 had become by the late 1980s or early 1990s “the natural governing party” because the “natural” evokes the effortlessness with which the Liberals win consecutive elections on contradictory platforms, and because “governing” rolls off the tongue more easily than “government.”

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Notes

[1] Peter C. Newman, The Distemper of Our Times: Canadian Politics in Transition, 1963-1968 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 232.

[2] Peter C. Newman, “Jack Pickersgill: ‘Sailor Jack’ and the Politics of Patronage,” 285-300 in Mavericks: Canadian Rebels, Renegades, and Anti-Heros (Harper-Collins Publishers Ltd, 2010), 288; Peter C. Newman, “Why the Grits Became the Natural Government Party,” chapter 6 in When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada (Random House Canada, 2011), 80

[3] Brooke Jeffrey, Divided Loyalties: The Liberal Party of Canada, 1984-2008 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 3 (“the natural governing party”); Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Mays for Our Future (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2013), 1 (“the natural governing party”); Robert Chodes, Rae Murphy, and Eric Hamovitch, “The Natural Governing Party (1945-1957),” chapter 2 in The Unmaking of Canada: The Hidden Theme in Canadian History Since 1945 (James Lorimer Limited, 1991), 9-23.

[4] Jesse Kline, “Liberals Prove They’re the ‘Natural Governing Party’ After All,” The National Post, 28 April 2025.