This paper explores the relationship between New Brunswick's two ethno-linguistic communities and the province's Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties. Using data from provincial elections from 1908 to 1999, we examine the strength of electoral support enjoyed by each party in both communities and the degree to which the parties have represented both groups in their decision-making bodies. Results from surveys of party activists are used to examine inter and intra party opinion structures on questions relating to language and ethnicity. We conclude that over the past three decades New Brunswick's political parties have adopted a brokerage approach and have managed to transcend the province's ethno-linguistic divide.

Cet article examine les relations entre les deux communautes ethnolinguistiques du NouveauBrunswick, ainsi qu'entre les partis progressiste-conservateur et liberal de la province. A l'aide des donnees des elections provinciales tenues entre 1908 et 1999, les auteurs examinent la portee de I'appui electoral accorde a chaque parti par chacune des communautes, ainsi que la mesure dans laquelle celles-ci sont representes au sein des grouper de prise de decision des partis. Les resultats d'enquetes menees aupres des militants des partis servent A examiner les structures d'opinion a l'interieur des partis et entre ceux-ci en ce qui concerne les questions liles a la langue et l'ethnicite. Les auteurs concluent que dans les trente derrieres annees, les partis politiques neo-brunswickois ont adopts une approche conciliatoire et qu'ils ont reussi a surmonter les differences ethnolinguistiques de la province.

Tensions between francophones and anglophones have often driven the national political agenda in Canada. From the hanging of Louis Riel, through an assortment of school and conscription crises to the interminable constitutional conflicts of the past four decades, our major political parties have strived to accommodate the divergent voices of French and English Canada. For obvious demographic reasons, such debates, while not entirely absent, have been significantly less common at the provincial level.' In Quebec, francophones constitute an overwhelming majority of the electorate, while in most of the other provinces, they are an all but invisible minority. Only in New Brunswick does the ethnic balance approximate that of the entire country. True, francophones were only 15.8% of the provincial population in 1871. A combination of differential birth and migration rates, however, led to the francophone proportion climbing to 38.3% by 1951 before falling back to the present-day figure of approximately 33% (Theriault, 41; statcan).2 Under such circumstances, where ethnic divisions have not only been deeply rooted but have also been significantly correlated with cleavages of religion, region and even class, the representational role of political elites is likely to be of some social import.

In this paper we examine the extent to which New Brunswick's two principal political parties (the Liberals and the Conservatives) embody the values and interests of one or both of the province's two Charter groups. In particular, we consider how ethnicity has impinged upon the two parties' distributions of electoral support and records of legislative achievements, and we consider whether these patterns have changed in modem times. Ultimately, we argue that in recent decades there has been a progressive detachment of New Brunswick's two major parties from their traditional ethnic bases. We find that until the 1970s the province's two linguistic communities were each closely identified with (and supportive of) a single political party - the francophone community with the Liberals and the anglophone community with the Conservatives. Our data indicate that this phenomenon changed dramatically in the subsequent decades, to the point today where each party has substantial representation, in both its activist and elected ranks, from both communities, and the relationship between language and the vote in New Brunswick provincial elections has declined dramatically.

Canadian Parties and the Accommodative Function

Canada's federal party system has traditionally been described using the brokerage model. The principal function of parties, in the Canadian variant of this model, is to act as agents of political integration. Parties do so by competing aggressively in all parts of the country and by including within their decision-making structures representatives of both sides of the most significant political cleavages (Siegfried, Dawson, McLeod, Brodie, Clarke). Rather than having different parties representing duelling interests, each party attempts to transcend the central cleavages and build accommodative bridges across these societal chasms. In his classic treatise on Canadian government, R. MacGregor Dawson writes that "the parties are the outstanding agents for bringing about cooperation and compromise between conflicting groups and interests of all kinds in the nation," (7) and "to gain power any party must have as its primary purpose the reconciliation of what may be the widely scattered interests of two or more of these areas" (21). The result is that "the differences within the parties can thus be more acute than between the parties themselves; and each party, if it is to command anything approaching general support from its members, must work out some kind of consensus within its own ranks" (21). This can be contrasted with systems in which party competition is centred around a society's fundamental cleavages. In these cases, parties form to represent particular sides of the most salient political disputes and make no effort at accommodation. Northern Ireland, with a traditionally absolute divide between Catholic and Protestant interests, would be an example of this type of party system.