Andrew Thompson, Liberal Party Reforms and the Engagement of Ethnocultural Communities, 1957 to 1961

In 1958, the Liberal Party's hopes for a rebound election victory were crushed by George Diefenbaker's decisive defeat of new party leader Lester Pearson. In assessing its performance, the Liberal Party believed that the Progressive Conservative Party's appeal to ethnocultural communities was one of the reasons behind their defeat. In a period where the Liberal Party underwent internal reform, looked for new leadership and moved on from the old guard, the party hired Toronto-area Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament Andrew Thompson as its Ethnic Liaison Officer. Thompson was tasked with rejuvenating the party's appeal to ethnocultural communities during this period. His efforts were part of broader party reforms during the Pearson opposition years. The analysis explains how Thompson and the Liberal Party reorganized categories into groupings and argues that the Liberal Party relied on categorizations of Canadians of various ethnicities that were non-British and non-French because they did not understand them. In doing so, they simplified them and imagined "ethnic groups" as votes at the ballot box. This article contributes to scholarship on Liberal Party reforms during the late 1950s and early 1960s while invoking new modes of historical analysis in a political history by focusing on the inception of Thompson's programme through an investigation of ethnicity and groupism.