The party was founded by Joseph Thauberger, who had been an unsuccessful Social Credit Party of Canada candidate in the 1972 Canadian election. Saskatchewan and British Columbia were the main sources of the party's membership. The first national meeting was held in Toronto a few weeks before the 1993 election. The party won 7,506 votes in the 1993 election.
In 1994, Thauberger stepped down, and was replaced by Claire Foss at a meeting in Winnipeg. In the run-up to the 1997 election, the party's board voted to support Paul Hellyer's Canadian Action Party because of that party's support for monetary reform. Foss ran as a CAP candidate in Okanagan-Shuswap (BC), and gained the largest number of votes of any CAP candidate. Foss was also a CAP candidate in the 2004 Canadian election.
The Liberal Party was reduced from a majority to a minority government due, in part, to a scandal in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services.
The period between Paul Martin's assumption of the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada on November 14, 2003, and the 2004 Canadian election being called on May 23, 2004, saw a large amount of infighting within the party.
In April, 2005 David Kilgour, one of the party's two MPs from Alberta announced that he was leaving the party to sit as an independent member of the House of Commons due to the damaging allegations of corruption in the Liberal Party's Quebec wing based on testimony in the Gomery Commission inquiry.
The Conservative Party of Canada (French: Parti conservateur du Canada) is a right wing political party in Canada, formed by the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in December 2003.
The party is still referred to as "Tory" by the media and retains the tie to the historical Conservative Party of Canada founded in 1854 by Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier by virtue of the fact that the merged entity assumed all assets and liabilities of the Progressive Conservative Party.
The party is often considered to be Canada's version of the United States Republican Party and the United Kingdom's Conservative Party due to their conservative positions.