Ontario Liberal Party
|Ontario Liberal Party|
|Party leader||John Fraser (interim)|
The Ontario Liberal Party (French Parti libéral de l'Ontario ) is a liberal political party in the Canadian province of Ontario . Although it is ideologically similar to the Liberal Party of Canada , the two parties are organizationally independent. Chair is Kathleen Wynne , incumbent Prime Minister of the province. Since the elections in June 2018, the Liberals only have 7 out of 107 MPs in the legislative assembly of Ontario , which is why the official party status has been revoked.
The Liberal Party of Ontario has its origins in the Reform Party of Robert Baldwin and William Lyon Mackenzie , which campaigned for self- government in the 1830s and 1840s and spoke out against the conservative clique rule of the Family Compact . The modern liberals emerged in 1857 when George Brown united the reformers and the radical Clear Grits of southeastern Ontario. After Ontario joined the Canadian Confederation in 1867, the Liberals were initially in the opposition, but gained a majority in 1871 under Edward Blake . The following year, Oliver Mowat became Prime Minister, who held this office until 1896, longer than anyone else.
After more than 30 years in power, the Liberals were defeated by the Conservatives in 1905. It began a slow decline and was briefly pushed into the role of only the third largest party by the United Farmers of Ontario . In the 1920s, the party was torn apart by wing fighting. Many reformist forces that supported the federal party under William Lyon Mackenzie King turned their backs on the provincial party because it was considered too narrow-minded and conservative. By 1930 the Liberals were a small, rural and Protestant party that only had support in the south-west of the province.
After a series of weak party leaders, Mitchell Hepburn was elected to the top of the party. He managed to form an electoral coalition with the liberal-progressives and to involve reformers, urban voters, Catholics and Francophones. Hepburn led the Liberal 1934 election victory, in which he benefited from the fact that the Conservatives with the consequences of the global economic crisis had to fight. William Lyon Mackenzie King refused to use the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to break up strikes by workers in the automotive industry, creating a deep rift between the Federal and Provincial Parties. Hepburn was deposed as party leader in 1942, and in 1943 the Liberals had to return to the opposition.
For the next four decades, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario dominated provincial politics. The liberals were often more conservative than the actual conservatives and their electoral base was again limited to the southwest. In the greater Toronto area they were temporarily no longer represented at all. It was not until 1987 that David Peterson managed to lead the Liberals to another election victory. Peterson had modernized the party and brought it back more into the middle of the political spectrum to appeal to urban voters and immigrants. But only three years later he was defeated and for the first time ever the Ontario New Democratic Party (NDP) had a majority. In 1996, Dalton McGuinty was elected party leader who led the Liberals to victory in 2003. In 2007 the party achieved a similarly good result, in 2011 it narrowly missed the absolute majority of seats and formed a minority government by 2018.
In the elections in June 2018, the party suffered a historic defeat with only 7 seats out of 107, thereby revoking its official party status . As a result, Kathleen Wynne resigned as party chairman, John Fraser was elected temporarily.
Results of the Ontario Liberal Party in the legislative assembly elections:
- Wendy Gillis: Kathleen Wynne resigns Liberal leadership. In: The Star. June 7, 2018, accessed August 13, 2019 .
- Elections in Ontario ( Memento of the original from December 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Ontario elections