Looking back on his time as prime minister, Justin Trudeau said that abandoning his promise of electoral reform was his biggest regret.
“Particularly as we approach this election … I do wish that we’d been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country, so that people could choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot,” Trudeau said after announcing his resignation in January, seeming to support a ranked ballot that would let voters pick their preferred candidates in numerical order.
“Parties would spend more time trying to be people’s second or third choices, and people would be looking for things they have in common, rather than trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other.”
In such a system, also called “alternative vote,” if one person didn’t get a clear majority on the first count, second-choice votes would be counted until someone got more than 50 per cent support.
CBC News posed the question to political experts: What would Monday’s election have looked like under a ranked ballot system?
Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at York University in Toronto who studies electoral reform, says the results would not have been as devastating for the smaller parties, particularly the NDP, who were clobbered by strategic voting efforts.
Pilon uses the B.C. riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith as an example: NDP incumbent Lisa Marie Barron fell to Conservative Tamara Kronis, who had just 35.2 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Liberals, NDP and Greens combined for 64.4 per cent.
“The reason that we saw such a decline for both the Greens and the NDP has less to do with public judgments about their efficacy or desirability as parties, and everything to do with the kind of straitjacket that people felt they were put into, in terms of the strategic [voting] dilemma that they faced,” Pilon said.
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He says that’s why in cases like Nanaimo–Ladysmith, supporters of NDP incumbents likely felt they had to “hold their nose” and vote Liberal to hold off the Conservatives.
Such voting strategies set off heated debates among some progressives in the lead-up to the election. As results rolled in Monday night, some voters posted on social media that they wished they had a ranked ballot system.
“What makes it so difficult is that voters lack the information to be able to make that strategic vote effectively, because to be really strategic, you’ve got to have a good sense of what everyone else is going to do — and that’s the very thing you can’t get,” Pilon said. “It’s very unlikely to get good polling information about an individual constituency.”
The NDP lost most of its seats after Monday’s vote, falling from 24 to seven and losing official party status.
Pilon says the ranked ballot system still tends to funnel support back to the biggest parties, which is why voting reform advocates generally prefer proportional representation, which would base a party’s number of seats in Parliament on its percentage of the popular vote.
But Pilon says Liberals in particular would benefit from ranked ballots because they would likely have more people willing to rate them in second place, whereas the Conservatives have fewer “adjacent parties” to draw from — though he notes some Conservative gains in Monday’s election may have come at the expense of the People’s Party of Canada.
The PPC captured just 0.7 per cent of the vote, after getting about five per cent in the 2021 federal election.
During his first campaign as Liberal leader in 2015, Trudeau promised to do away with the first-past-the-post system, where a candidate wins simply by having the most votes.
His government struck a House of Commons all-party special committee to review other voting systems, including ranked ballots, and released a report in December 2016 that recommended a referendum on a switch to a form of proportional representation.
But Liberal MPs disagreed, saying the recommendations were “rushed” and “too radical,” and the plan fizzled.
Electoral reform was not in the Liberals’ 2025 platform and current leader Mark Carney has said it is not a priority for his government.
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Pilon says Australia is the only Western industrialized country that uses ranked ballots today, though Manitoba and B.C. used versions of ranked ballots between the 1920s and ’50s, and the federal Liberals have toyed with the idea of electoral reform at various times dating back to 1919. Ireland also has its own version of a ranked ballot.
In B.C.’s 1952 election, the Liberal and Conservative parties formed a coalition to keep socialism at bay, and introduced ranked ballots under the assumption that voters who picked one of their parties would rank the other in second place.
Lydia Miljan, head of the University of Windsor’s political science department, says that plan “backfired” and led to the Social Credit Party pulling off a slim victory.
“That tells you that voters are savvy to this kind of political manipulation, and that can change the calculus depending on how it’s instituted,” she said.
In 2025, Miljan says a ranked ballot may have helped the Liberals eke out a majority — the party landed at 169 seats, falling just three short of a majority government.
“I don’t think it would have made a big difference, except probably in the few ridings where there were three-way splits, where you might have gotten a few more NDP seats and probably equally more Liberal seats,” she said. “In that respect, you would have had a Liberal majority, most likely.”
Andrea Lawlor, associate professor of political science at McMaster University in Hamilton, says while we can’t be sure how voters would have ordered their preferences, it’s possible a ranked ballot could have fundamentally shifted the balance of power between the parties.
“In this election, with such a short walk between a Liberal minority and a Liberal majority, change at the margins could have had a dramatic impact,” she said.
Lawlor says she doesn’t see electoral reform becoming an issue in the near future, but suggests politicians should carefully consider the possibility “if we want to see the continuation of the multi-party system as we know it, in an environment of increasing polarization.”
