In the 1930s, Professor Frank H. Underhill of the University of Toronto also argued that Canada’s two major political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, operated in similar ways by advancing the same policies appealing to the same variety of sectional/regional and class interests. In doing so, Canada had perfected the two-party system and had marginalized liberalism and radicalism. Underhill argued the result was a pervasive poverty in Canadian political culture. Not coincidentally, Underhill was centrally involved in the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a farmer-labour coalition born during the Great Depression which became Canada’s first successful federal third party, the social-democratic New Democratic Party.

That was an interesting little bit of history I did not know.