in canada, we've actually tended to have a stable four party system, with a fourth party on the far right. for most of the twentieth century, that fourth party was the social credit party, which started off promoting a type of right-wing collectivism but merged into a christian right party and eventually emerged as the neo-liberal reform party. a libertarian party existed in canada as a moderate sized protest party for most of the 80s and 90s, before emerging as the core of the federal green party and shifting first to the centre and then to the left. this historical fourth party was recently reconstructed as the pseudo-libertarian populist party, which is a ragtag collection of nonconformist conservatives with a wide array of wacky positions - something that was also true of social credit, which, amongst other things, got a reputation for associating with neo-nazi groups in quebec.

this fourth party has at times represented upwards of 10% of the population, but it generally only holds a handful of disconnected seats at any given time, often as a result of members of the conventional conservative party leaving or being thrown out for being too extreme. they do not exist in large numbers in any specific place, thankfully. but, they're about as right-wing as you can get.

by siphoning out these voters into a fourth party, their influence is kept out of the mainstream conservative movement. this balance was upset when the reform movement took over the right, but it has since been re-established and we (thankfully) escaped any serious consequence from it. by keeping these voices isolated, their influence is minimized when the conservative faction does take over power. and, their ideas are rarely considered for legislation by the ruling party, so they are generally kept outside of the dialectic.

the fifth faction is the green party, which i want to imagine will evolve into a new left, but is frustrating me so far. with the longterm realities of post-industrialization setting in, the concept of the left as a voice for industrial unionism needs to undergo some reanalysis. we don't want to bring the jobs back, we want to mechanize local production. so, what does a left look like in a post-worker society? and, i have to deduce that it accepts some heavy concepts of redistribution, such as in the form of a gai, and is laser-focused on the needs for sustainability in development. that has to be the new left - a libertarian, ecosocialist left. as such, the greens may be replacing the ndp as the traditional third party, the party of leftist opposition, the party of new ideas.

while it may seem natural to expect the greens to merge with the ndp, it is actually more likely that the ndp will be absorbed by the ruling party. that's what actually tends to happen to historical lefts that get left behind by the mode of production. just ask the liberals in britain.

the sixth faction in canada is the nationalist francophone party, represented by the bloc at the federal level and three ideologically different parties at the provincial level. quebec actually has the full spectrum of separatist parties, now - the caq on the right, the pq in the centre and the qs on the left. what these parties all have in common is that they support some kind of devolution relationship with the federal government. the bloc were initially a faction of the conservative movement, before becoming a socialist party, and then eventually reorienting to a more centrist position. as this faction is not tied to any place on the spectrum, they exist outside of the dialectic at the level of federal politics, and fully realize it - they prefer to operate from a distant point of critique. but, canada has a competing three-party dialectic at the subnational level, with quebec as thesis, alberta as antithesis and ottawa as synthesis. via this dialectic, quebec has contributed ideas like national daycare to the federal policy discussion. so, this faction is intentionally obstructing at the parliamentary level but contributes to the erection of federal policy via this other mechanism. and, perhaps there may be a similar potential role for the hispanic caucus, as hispanic culture is legitimately distinct from eastern puritan culture, in the united states.