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The Globe and Mail’s Chris Hannay pointed out a historical oddity on Monday: if the Newfoundland Progressive Conservatives lose their grip on government later this month, and it looks as though they will, Canada will be left without any governing party with the word “Conservative” in its name. Is there perhaps a Stephen Harper-induced crisis in the Conservative brand?

There is an obvious paradox here: part of the reason we have some conservative governments under other names is that the Liberal brand collapsed in Western Canada decades ago, and that made it easier for Liberal parties to be taken over by privatizing right-wingers, as in British Columbia, or swept more or less out of existence, as happened (in different ways) in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

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What are (Conservatives) devoted to conserving?

Perhaps the real question is why the Conservative-branded parties in those provinces all blew themselves up so spectacularly. Saskatchewan has a successful conservative-populist premier, but the name “Conservative” with a capital C still has connotations of criminal conspiracy there. The nominal B.C. Conservatives have outlasted Social Credit, which took over their place on the spectrum in the 1950s, but got hardly half as many votes as the Greens in 2013.