This dissertation examines the characteristic features and problems of a
party/movement as they pertain to the Family Coalition Party of British Columbia
(FCP). The FCP is a minor provincial political party in British Columbia that was
founded in 1991 to provide a formal political voice for pro-life and pro-family
supporters in the province. After years of frustrated activism within the pro-life and
pro-family movements and ineffectual political representation, the founders of the FCP
sought to establish a political access point that could provide a more direct route to the
province's political decision-making process. The result was the formation of the
Family Coalition Party, a conservative political organization that supports social policies
which are resolutely pro-life and promote a vision for the restoration of what is
understood as the traditional family. The primary goal of the party is the advancement
and implementation of such policies, with electoral success pursued as a secondary
goal. This agenda renders the FCP an organization that uses a political party form to
perform social movement work or functions. In this regard, the FCP exhibits the hybrid
duality of a party/movement in the tradition of the Cooperative Commonwealth
Federation and the Green Parties of Canada and Germany.
In developing a sociopolitical and ideological profile of the Family Coalition
Party and its politics of the family, its historical roots are traced back to the conservative
political writings of Edmund Burke and brought forward to the current era of late
twentieth century neoconservatism. The pro-family movement (PFM), of which the
FCP is a part, is examined comparatively in the United States, where it exists in its most
mature form under the auspices of such Christian Right organizations as the Christian Coalition, and in British Columbia, where the movement remains in a state of relative
political infancy and organizational disunity. Despite the disparities in organizational
maturation, the movements in both countries share a high degree of ideological
resonance concerning their opposition to feminism, abortion, euthanasia, and
reproductive technologies, and their support for increased parental control in education,
programmes that will promote the traditional family, and a minimalist state.
To understand the duality of the Family Coalition Party as a party/movement, it
is first analyzed as a social movement organization (SMO) and then as a minor party in
Canadian politics. Using contemporary social movement theory, the Family Coalition
Party is found to exhibit the same traits and problems as those typically characteristic of
the New Social Movements, despite the ideological disparities between the two. To this
end, the FCP can be understood as a sub-type of New Social Movement, a Resurgence
Movement, as it attempts to simultaneously resist one type of social change while
promoting another by working to re-establish a diminishing set of normative cultural
beliefs. As a minor political party of protest, the FCP, with reference to relevant political
science research, is seen to embody the motivations, features and difficulties of minor
parties as evidenced in the Social Credit League, the CCF, and the Green Party. In this
regard the emergence of the FCP is symptomatic of a cadre party system that fails to
adequately represent issues important to an aggrieved segment of the population and
also experiences the institutional obstacles of the Westminster parliamentary model of
political representation.
In examining the FCP as a party/movement, four ways of analytically relating
political parties and social movements are reviewed before a fusionist perspective is used to identify the characteristic features and problems of party/movements. Three
sources of tension (organizational, institutional and cultural) are subsequently
identified. These tensions are one of two types: they are either difficulties unique to
party/movements, created by the deliberate fusing of party form with movement
function; otherwise, they are problems common to every SMO or minor political party
striving to achieve political legitimacy and potency. For party/movements, the
challenge of resolving this latter set of problems is exacerbated beyond the level of
difficulty experienced by single identity organizations precisely because of their dual
identity. The experience of other party/movements, such as the CCF and the Green
Parties of Canada and Germany, suggests that their specific tensions make it difficult to
maintain a dual identity, with a drift towards either political institutionalization or
dissolution likely, if not inevitable. While the Family Coalition Party is presently
maintaining its party/movement nature, its future as such is in doubt unless the
tensions of fusion that it now faces are effectively managed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8594 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | MacKenzie, Michael Christopher |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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