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Manitoba Liberal Party

The Manitoba Liberal Party was formed in the 1882 by Thomas Greenway as a Provincial Rights opposition to the provincial government. Greenway's Liberals took power in 1888 and ended the Canadian Pacific Railway's monopoly in the province. The Liberal's most notable feat was curtailing the rights of French-Canadians in the province. Manitoba had been founded as a bilingual province but Greenway's government provoked the Manitoba Schools Question ending the educational rights of (predominantly French) Catholics making the public school system entirely English and Protestant. English became the province's sole official language. The Liberals were defeated by the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party in 1900.

Tobias Crawford Norris became Liberal leader in 1910 and Premier in 1915. The Norris Liberals introduced temperance laws, votes for women, workers compensation and the minimum wage. Despite its progressive orintation, the government was also involved in the suppression of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. The Liberals were swept from power by the United Farmers of Manitoba (who subsequently became the Progressive Party. The Progressives fromed a coalition with the Liberals in 1928 when the Bracken government was unable to win a majority government on its own forming the Liberal-Progressive coalition government. Gradually, the Liberals and Progressives merged and the Liberals became the dominant force in the party. By the late 1940s the Liberal-Progressives were, for all intents and purposes, Liberals.

The Liberal-Progressive and Liberal governments were cautious and moderate. Following World War II the government of Stuart Sinclair Garson led a program of rapid rural electification but was otherwise conservative. Garson left provincial politics in 1948 to join the federal Liberal Cabinet of Louis St. Laurent.

The Liberal government of Garson's successor, Douglas Lloyd Campbell was socially conservative and cautious. The educational system remained primative, dominated in the 1950s by one room schools, and continued to ignore the rights of the declining French-Canadian minority. The Liberals were swept out of office in 1958 by the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives of Dufferin Roblin who, as Red Tories were actually to the left of Campbell's Liberals.

The Liberal Party declined as politics in the province became polarized between the Tories and the New Democratic Party of Manitoba. A succession of Liberal leaders such as Gildas Molgat, Israel Asper and Lloyd Axworthy were unable to reverse the party's decline and it held only a handful of seats in the provincial legislature until Sharon Carstairs led a revived party to Official Opposition status in the 1988 election that defeated the NDP government and brought Gary Filmon and the Tories to power in a minority government. With the NDP in third place it looked like the Liberals may be able to displace them but, under Gary Doer the NDP revived and the Liberals slipped back into third place in the 1990 election with only seven seats (despite having 28% of the vote) to the NDP's 20 and 30 for the Conservatives. In 1995 the Liberals won only three seats and lost official party status and have not been able to recover in subsequent elections.

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