The Unite the Right (French: Unir la Droite) movement was a Canadian political movement which existed from around the mid-1990s to 2003. The movement came into being when it became clear that neither of Canada's two main right-of-centre political parties, the Reform Party of Canada/Canadian Alliance (CA) and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (PC), was independently capable of defeating the governing Liberal Party. The objective of the movement, therefore, was to merge the two parties into a single party (or, if this was not possible, to find a power-sharing arrangement between the two parties). The goal of uniting the right was accomplished in December 2003 with the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada.

The Liberals, under returning prime minister Pierre Trudeau, had just secured a majority in the 1980 federal election, over incumbent Joe Clark. In Trudeau's first year back as prime minister, he implemented the NEP (National Energy Program). This specific policy was primarily designed to increase ownership of Canadian oil, by Canadians, and to balance the pricing of oil and energy products equally, nationwide. It's secondary purposes were to promote renewable energy, and increase tax profits through the western provinces.

However, Alberta (led by the PC government of Peter Lougheed) strongly opposed the NEP, and espousing the opinion that it interfered with the jurisdiction of the province, and dehydrated Alberta of its tax revenue. Fiscal conservatives (like the PC's, and eventual Reform Party members, supporters, and voters) attribute the NEP to a rising unemployment rate, bankruptcy rate, and a widescale economic deficit. The term "Western alienation" was founded as a result of the NEP, and its purported negative economic effects on Alberta, and presenting a bias towards Eastern Canada. However, four years later, Progressive Conservative party leader Brian Mulroney would achieve victory in the 1984 federal election, and immediately reverse the policy.

The Reform Party came into being in 1987, due in part to opposition to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government that ruled Canada from 1984 to 1993. A significant number of Western Canadians had strongly disliked what they perceived as the Mulroney government's pro-Quebec approach and rampant use of patronage. They also viewed the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord as not in the West's best interests. Other Western conservatives felt that Mulroney's government was not sufficiently neo-liberal in its fiscal taxation and federal spending policies while some social conservatives were critical of the government's failed attempts to regulate and reduce abortion in Canada.

In the 1993 election, the upstart Reform Party won 52 seats in the west, and the once-powerful PCs led by newly minted Prime Minister Kim Campbell were reduced to only two seats in Parliament. Both parties were, however, almost completely shut out of Ontario and Quebec in this election, and also in the elections of 1997 and 2000. The two central Canadian provinces together represented over half the seats in the House of Commons; in the 1993, 1997 and 2000 elections, the total number of central Canadian seats held, collectively, by the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance and the PCs never rose above six, out of a total of over 170 available seats.

With two right-wing parties competing for power, it became apparent that unseating the governing Liberals would be next to impossible. In the 1997 election, both the PCs and the Reform Party respectively polled roughly 19% each in popular support. The Reform party emerged with 60 Western seats and Official Opposition status, while the demoralized PCs emerged from the brink of oblivion with 20 eastern seats, and regained official party status. More importantly, the Liberals emerged with only a five-seat majority in the election, and many pundits suggested that the combined PC and Reform votes would have been enough to unseat the Liberals, or at least reduce them to minority status.

The Liberals under Jean Chrétien had governed Canada since 1993, and were never threatened by the divided right during the Chrétien era. Especially important in the Liberals' electoral success was the province of Ontario, in which the Liberals utterly dominated Canada's most populous province. Both Reform and the PC Party received many votes, but because of the first past the post (FPTP) system, this was not enough to win more than a handful of Ontario's approximately 103 seats. At the same time, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, who some suggested were kindred spirits in policy and direction to Reform and Blue Tory PCs, had formed a provincial government under Premier Mike Harris.

There were many barriers to a merger. Polls had found that two-thirds of traditional PC voters would vote for the Liberals before endorsing a united Canadian Alliance/PC party. Some Westerners also had deep concerns that the new party would be dominated by Central Canada, much as they thought the Progressive Conservatives had been. Leadership and MPs from both sides of the division also opposed a merger out of concerns that both parties were distinct political entities, and not part of a larger conservative movement.