The GST, the government's failed attempts to revise the Constitution with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, and the early 1990s recession, led to the party's increasing unpopularity and eventual collapse in the 1993 federal election where they won just two seats.

When it became clear that neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the Canadian Alliance could on their own defeat the incumbent Liberals, an effort to unite the right-of-centre parties emerged.

[citation needed] A major weakness of the party since 1885 was its inability to win support in Quebec, estranged significantly by that year's execution of Louis Riel.

as insensitive to French-Canadian ambitions and interests and seldom succeeded in winning more than a handful of seats in Quebec, with a few notable exceptions: The party never fully recovered from the fragmentation of Mulroney's broad coalition in the late 1980s, resulting in part from the failure of two provinces to ratify the Meech Lake Accord.

Several loosely associated provincial Progressive Conservative parties continue to exist in Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

From 1867 on, the party was identified with Protestant and, in Quebec, Roman Catholic social values, British imperialism, Canadian nationalism, and constitutional centralism.

In contrast to "American conservative" counterparts, however, they did not undertake as dramatic an ideological turnaround in the first half of the 20th century by continuing to follow mercantilism[dubious – discuss] and nascent notions of the welfare state.

Drew, Leslie Frost, John Robarts, William Davis, Peter Lougheed, Joe Clark and Flora MacDonald.

When the PC party held power at the federal level, it never truly embraced Reaganomics and its crusade against "big government" as vociferously as was done in the USA.

The participants, known as the Port Hopefuls, developed a program including many Conservative goals such as support for free enterprise and conscription.

[2] In the early days of Canadian confederation, the party supported a mercantilist approach to economic development: export-led growth with high import barriers to protect local industry.

In general, Canada's political history has consisted of Tories alternating power with the Liberals, albeit often in minority governments supported by smaller parties.

Diefenbaker was able to win most of the parliamentary seats in Western Canada, much of those in Ontario, and, with the support of the Union Nationale provincial government, a large number in Quebec.

His cabinet split over Diefenbaker's refusal of American demands that Canada accept nuclear warheads for Bomarc missiles based in North Bay, Ontario, and La Macaza, Quebec.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, following Quebec's Quiet Revolution, the Progressive Conservatives recognized the need to increase their appeal to Canada's francophone population.

Mulroney and the government pursued an aggressive environmental agenda under the aide of then-environmental policy advisor, present-day Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

[citation needed] A number of economic and governance issues contributed to the fall of the Progressive Conservative party at the federal level in the 1993 federal election: The second major factor leading to the Mulroney government's demise was that the party's base in Quebec came from Quebec nationalists, who withdrew their support after the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords.

Many Quebec Tories, including a number of Members of Parliament (MPs), left the party to form the Bloc Québécois with like-minded Liberals.

Following Mulroney's resignation, his successor as Tory leader and as prime minister was Kim Campbell, who led the party into the disastrous election of 1993.

Even though the Progressive Conservatives finished third in the popular vote (just percentage points behind Reform), their support was spread out across the entire country and was not concentrated in enough areas to translate into more seats.

Many observers argue that for over ten years, from 1993 to 2004, the "conservative" vote was split between the two parties, allowing Liberal candidates to win ridings that were previously considered safe for the Tories, made possible by a first-past-the-post electoral system.

Former leader Joe Clark returned to the post in a vote in which all party members were eligible to cast ballots, instead of a traditional leadership convention.

Clark realized that as long as the centre-right vote was divided, there was no chance of dislodging the Liberals[citation needed], but he wanted a merger on his own terms.

[citation needed] While some of them rejoined the Alliance later, seven of them, led by Chuck Strahl of British Columbia and including Grey, refused and formed the Democratic Representative Caucus.

The DRC quickly entered a coalition with the Progressive Conservatives, which lasted until 2002 when Stephen Harper ousted Day as Alliance leader.

Orchard's endorsement of MacKay was predicated on four bullet points laid out in the Orchard-MacKay agreement, one of which expressly forbade the merger of the PC Party of Canada with the Canadian Alliance.

After only a few months as party leader though, MacKay reneged on his promise and proceeded to negotiate a merger with the Alliance, which he announced had occurred on October 15, 2003.

On March 24, 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed nine new senators, two of whom, Nancy Ruth and Elaine McCoy, were designated as Progressive Conservatives.

The death of Senator Doody on December 27, 2005, and the mandatory retirement of Norman Atkins on June 27, 2009, and Lowell Murray on September 26, 2011, left McCoy, the youngest of the five, as the sole Progressive Conservative in the Senate and the last sitting PC in either chamber of Parliament until February 11, 2013, when she chose to change her designation to "Independent Progressive Conservative".

McCoy changed her designation to "Independent" on February 17, 2016, thus bringing to an end the presence of Progressive Conservatives in the Parliament of Canada.