Taking a Ride on a Bumpy Road to Imagined Community - How Sub-Provincial Political Parties in Canada Became Vehicles to Pursue, Perform and Participate in Region-Making, 1967-1988

This dissertation explores an aspect of Canadian sub-provincial regionalism the creation of new political parties that either acted as primary vehicles for its expression or made pointed appeals to this form of regionalism to draw popular support for their larger programme to Illuminate a captivating site in the study of projects of regionalism. The New Labrador Party (NLP), the Northern Ontario Heritage Party (NOHP), and the Cape Breton Labor Party (CBLP) all engaged in activities that, in whole or in part, promoted specific ideas of the nature of region and a regions interests. Using a combination of interviews, archival research, and reviews of published material from the years these parties were active, the dissertation provides case studies of each party through the use of historical narratives and a comparative analysis of the three parties through a framing concept. The dissertation asks why these kinds of parties appeared in parts of Canada in the latter half of the 20th century, what their supporters hoped to accomplish, how they promoted their ideas and arguments, how opponents refuted these arguments or undermined a party and its members, and how their relative successes and failures should be measured. Regionalists framed their project using three major arguments to diagnose the problem: exploitation; alienation and neglect; and diversity from other communities. Rhetoric and symbolic imagery used within these arguments employed the idea of internal colonialism, and discourses of citizenship, fairness, equality, and distinct lived experience. Opponents used counter frames to dispute the value of these parties or to promote alternatives. The dissertation concludes that these parties should be understood metaphorically as vehicles with which to drive the project and process of region. As vehicles, they were primarily functional creations, their design dictated by the needs of their creators and supporters and shaped by prevailing trends within a given historical context. Focussing on a type of vehicle as a lens through which to examine region is therefore an immensely fruitful exercise when historicizing this concept and the comparative method provides an additional degree of depth and confirmation of observations made.