Some of the people, some of the time: the Confederation of Regions Party in New Brunswick, 1989-1991

From the late 1960s through the 1980s, New Brunswickers witnessed the advancement of provincial and national bilingualism driven forward by politicians who assumed a general consensus on the matter. To many analysts' surprise, the extent of electoral discontent dramatically surfaced in the 1991 provincial election when, the Confederation of Regions Party of New Brunswick, which existed in the province for only two years and was committed to the elimination of official bilingualism, became the Official Opposition. This thesis explores the convergence of events and issues that may have contributed to the success in New Brunswick of a parry of western origin and of a western tradition, a party of populist right wing views which encompassed many issues; and a party committed to the ascendancy of a unilingual English mainstream and the reform of formal politics to address what they perceived as the problem of inadequate representation in the province. Finally, this thesis also challenges some long held assumptions about New Brunswick's political culture by documenting, among the New Brunswick electorate, a willingness to protest legislative action, in both the civil and electoral arena, and then situating CoR-NB within this tradition. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative research methods, this work ultimately concludes that CoR-NB and its base of support were much more varied than any single-issue hypothesis could suggest. The CoR Party was able to mobilize voters of all partisan stripes around a series of issues both related to and tangential to language legislation. However, this convergence was fleeting and CoR-NB was unable to capitalize on the support it received to make long-term political gains.