ABSTRACT
The Liberal Party of Canada presents us with a puzzle – it has no factions. Given the party’s long dominance of the country’s national politics, our question is why not? Casting this as a puzzle implies three things: first, that factions are a general and even natural feature of dominant political parties; second, that the Liberals do dominate Canada’s national electoral politics and governance; and third, that there really are no factions in the Liberal Party. Establishing the last of these propositions, that something doesn’t exist – in this case there are no factions in the Canadian Liberal Party – is no simple matter and may ultimately be essentially a matter of definition. Without engaging in a major theoretical exposition, factions are normally understood to represent the institutionalisation of identifiable ongoing internal divisions which provide the structure and basis of intra-party competition. While there is undoubtedly as much internal competition within the Liberal Party as any other, particularly in its leadership and candidate selection processes, no one has yet identified any ongoing organisational factionalism and so it seems reasonable to start from the proposition that there really is none.
