Confederation of Regions Party of Canada


The Confederation of Regions Party was a right-wing federal political party in Canada founded in 1984 by Elmer Knutson. It was founded as a successor to the Western Canada Federation, a non-partisan organization, to fight the Liberal Party of Canada. The CoR aimed to fill the void on the right of the political spectrum left by the decline of the Social Credit Party of Canada and the growing unpopularity among westerners of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada under the leadership of Brian Mulroney.
The party also attracted significant support as a protest vote against official bilingualism among some voters who were not necessarily ideologically opposed to mainstream Canadian political parties on other issues. The party proposed dividing Canada into four 'regions', western Canada, Atlantic Canada, Ontario and Quebec, each with an equal number of seats in the House of Commons of Canada.
In the 1984 federal election, it nominated 55 candidates, who won 65,655 votes in total, or 0.52% of the popular vote across the country. The party took 2.2% of the vote in Alberta and peaked with 6.7% in Manitoba.
In the 1988 federal election, its 51 candidates won 41,342 votes, 0.31% of the popular vote. One of its candidates was Paul Fromm, leader of the right-wing Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform and Canadian Association for Free Expression, and who was known to attend racist gatherings and associate with neo-Nazis. .
The party's greatest success came in New Brunswick, where its provincial wing, the New Brunswick Confederation of Regions Party, held the status of official opposition from 1991 to 1995.
After the demise of CoR, many former supporters joined the Reform Party of Canada.

Provincial wings

The CoR captured about 2% of the vote in provincial elections in the 1988 Manitoba election and the 1990 Ontario election.

Alberta

The CoR's Alberta wing nominated candidates in the 1986 provincial election and the 1993 provincial election. In 1986, the party nominated 6 candidates, who won a total of 2,866 votes, or 0.40% of the total. In 1993, the party nominated 12 candidates, who won 3,556 votes, or 0.36% of the total.
On 17 June 1996, the Chief Electoral Officer of Alberta, cancelled the registration of the Confederation of Regions Party of Alberta and the party was struck from the Register of Alberta Political Parties because the party failed to comply with the registration requirements of the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act. The COR Party was struck from the register because two conflicting groups in the party claimed different persons were officers of the party. The party presented different addresses of record. The conflicting groups had different interpretations of the COR Party Constitution.
As the Chief Electoral Officer did not have the authority to resolve such issues, he referred the participants in the dispute to the courts. Neither side in the dispute applied to the courts in an effort to resolve the problem.
Leaders

New Brunswick

Ontario

Party program

The party program was set out in a website that aimed to re-establish CoR as a federal political party. Grammatical, punctuation and formatting errors have been left intact.