Liberals
• The Liberal Party of Canada is the longest-running political party in the country, and the most historically successful.
• They’ve held power for such long periods of Canadian history.
• Originally the party of disenfranchised French-Canadians and Catholics in the early colonial period, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Liberals evolved into a more generic, centrist party favoring traditional British liberal values of free markets and personal responsibility, as well as tolerant relations between French and English Canadians. Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919), who championed all of the above to become the most successful and long-reigning of Canada’s early Liberal prime ministers, remains the iconic figure of commonsense, moderate Canadian liberalism of this period.
• Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1919-2000), ran the country from 1968 to 1984, and remains a sort of “founding father” figure of modern Canadian liberalism.
• Trudeau believed that a larger, more activist Canadian government could help alleviate the country’s social and economic ills, and create a more compassionate and egalitarian “Just Society” in the process.
• Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien (b. 1934) and his finance minister, Paul Martin (b. 1938), ran the country from 1993 to 2006, and are credited with helping move the Liberal Party to the centre by championing balanced budgets and low taxes.
• Today, the Liberal Party portrays itself as a party that is fiscally conservative, but socially progressive. They are strongly supportive of abortion rights, gay marriage and ample immigration, but also favor a largely unregulated free market. The Party has moved away from being quite as pro-”big government” as it was in the past.

NDP(New Democratic Party)

• Founded during the midst of the Great Depression
• This was originally a hardline socialist party dedicated to the downfall of the capitalist system. In the decades since, the NDP has moved in a more moderate direction, away from doctrinaire Marxism and towards a more modern spirit of social democracy and a “mixed economy,” where the government regulates but doesn’t rule.
• The current leader of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair (b. 1954), is a former member of the Quebec legislature who actually began his political career in the Liberal Party.
• For a long time it seemed like the NDP was stuck on the fringes forever. During the 1990s, some predicted it might disappear entirely. But then, in the 2011 federal election, the party made a sudden, dramatic breakthrough, upping their seat count from 37 to 102 overnight — and sending the Liberals to third place with a distant 34. Much of this success was credited to NDP leader Jack Layton (1950-2011), a politician of great charisma and skill who helped make his party more electorally viable in Quebec — a province written off by many of his predecessors.
• Today the party is probably best regarded as a pragmatic party of the centre-left with an appeal and agenda broadly similar to that of the Liberals.