section_path: National variants/North America/Canada
section_name: Canada
paragraph_text: Canada
  
  Canada's conservatives had their roots in the Tory loyalists who left America after the American Revolution. They developed in the socio-economic and political cleavages that existed during the first three decades of the 19th century and had the support of the mercantile, professional, and religious elites in Ontario and to a lesser extent in Quebec. Holding a monopoly over administrative and judicial offices, they were called the Family Compact in Ontario and the Chateau Clique in Quebec. John A. Macdonald 's successful leadership of the movement to confederate the provinces and his subsequent tenure as prime minister for most of the late 19th century rested on his ability to bring together the English-speaking Protestant aristocracy and the ultramontane Catholic hierarchy of Quebec and to keep them united in a conservative coalition.
  
  The conservatives combined Toryism and pro-market liberalism. They generally supported an activist government and state intervention in the marketplace, and their policies were marked by noblesse oblige —a paternalistic responsibility of the elites for the less well-off. The party was known as the Progressive Conservatives from 1942 until 2003, when the party merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada.
  
  The conservative and autonomist Union Nationale, led by Maurice Duplessis, governed the province of Quebec in periods from 1936 to 1960 and in a close alliance with the Catholic Church, small rural elites, farmers, and business elites. This period, known by liberals as the Great Darkness, ended with the Quiet Revolution and the party went into terminal decline.
  
  By the end of the 1960s, the political debate in Quebec centred around the question of independence, opposing the social democratic and sovereignist Parti Québécois and the centrist and federalist Quebec Liberal Party, therefore marginalising the conservative movement. Most French Canadian conservatives rallied either the Quebec Liberal Party or the Parti Québécois, while some of them still tried to offer an autonomist third-way with what was left of the Union Nationale or the more populists Ralliement créditiste du Québec and Parti national populaire, but by the 1981 provincial election politically organised conservatism had been obliterated in Quebec. It slowly started to revive at the 1994 provincial election with the Action démocratique du Québec, who served as Official opposition in the National Assembly from 2007 to 2008, before merging in 2012 with François Legault 's Coalition Avenir Québec, which took power in 2018. The modern Conservative Party of Canada has rebranded conservatism and, under the leadership of Stephen Harper, added more conservative policies.
  
  Yoram Hazony, a scholar on the history and ideology of conservatism, identified Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson as the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation.