At the beginning of 2025, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, announced his decision to resign. He will stay in office until March 2025, when the Liberal Party selects a new leader, who will also become Canada’s Prime Minister. Trudeau’s successor will have to call a federal election by 20 October 2025, with the Liberal Party trailing the Conservative Party by over 20 points in opinion polls and facing the prospect of a landslide defeat in elections to Canada’s House of Commons.
After announcing his planned resignation, Trudeau said that failing to enact electoral reform was one of the biggest regrets of his nearly decade-long tenure as Prime Minister. How and why did this failure occur and what lessons might it have for us in the UK?
Canada is one of the few democracies that uses the same First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system that the UK uses for its general elections. This is a system that produced the most disproportional result in history at the 2024 UK general election, meaning the share of MPs received by each party least reflects how people voted since the dawn of universal suffrage in the early twentieth century.
Based on current polling, FPTP looks likely to also produce a very disproportional result in the forthcoming Canadian election. This time it appears that it will be the right-wing Conservatives who will benefit, with CBC’s poll tracker giving them the support of about 45% of the public but projected to win about 66% of seats in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, two centre-left parties, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP), are both sitting at around 20% public support but are projected to win only around 20% of MPs between them.
If such an outcome did occur, it would be far from the first time that a Canadian government has won a comfortable majority in the House of Commons based on a minority of votes in the country. The last time this happened was in 2015, the federal election that saw Justin Trudeau become Prime Minister for the first time, when his Liberal Party won 54.4% of seats in parliament on the basis of just 39.5% of votes cast.
However, the Liberal Party manifesto produced for that 2015 general election was notable for a commitment ‘to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-past-voting system’.
The manifesto went on to indicate that an all-party parliamentary committee would review a variety of reforms, including proportional representation and that ‘within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform’.
What went wrong?
Following the Liberals election victory in 2015, a House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform was established, with members appointed on the basis of party vote shares at the 2015 federal election. The Committee launched a national consultation that included a ‘cross-Canada tour to consult broadly with Canadians to identify viable alternate voting systems to replace the first-past-the-post system’.
The Committee presented their final report to the House of Commons in early December 2016. One of its key recommendations was that the government should select a proportional representation system (excluding pure party list systems) and ask the Canadian people to chose between the PR system and FPTP in a referendum.
Unfortunately, despite the Liberal Party’s manifesto commitment to enact electoral reform and end FPTP, the government’s response was to reject the Committee’s findings, with the Minister of Democratic Institutions stating that “there isn’t a consensus on how to move forward”.
It became clear that Trudeau was only willing to consider his preferred form of electoral reform – Ranked Choice Voting, or as we refer to it, the Alternative Vote (AV). AV is not a proportional voting system and therefore would not have met the criteria for the Committee’s recommendation for the government to select a proportional alternative to FPTP.
It is very disappointing that Trudeau was unwilling to consider proportional representation options for electoral reform, having first become Prime Minister on a platform that included ending FPTP for Canadian federal elections.
Given the fact that support for proportional representation has received the backing of the Labour Party conference and polling shows that PR is far more popular than FPTP among the general public, we think it would be wise for Keir Starmer to reconsider his position on PR, so that he does not end up with the same regret as Justin Trudeau.
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