Bringing back the right : traditional family values and the countermovement politics of the Family Coalition Party of British Columbia
Creators: name: MacKenzie, Michael Christopher
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: 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.