Looking back in his time as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau said that abandoning his promise of electoral reform was his greatest regret.
“Particularly as we approach this choice … I would like to have been able to change the way we chose our governments in this country, so that people can choose a second option or a third option in the same vote,” Trudeau said after announcing his resignation in January, seeming to support a classified vote that would allow voters to choose their favorite candidates in numerical order.
“The parties would spend more time trying to be the second or third option of people, and people would be looking for things they have in common, instead of trying to polarize and divide Canadians with each other.”
In this system, also called “alternative vote”, if a person did not obtain a clear majority in the first count, the second option votes would be counted until someone received more than 50 percent support.
CBC News raised the question to political experts: how would the election on Monday have been under a system of classified tickets?
Dennis Pilon, a professor of political science at the University of York in Toronto who studies the electoral reform, says that the results would not have been so devastating for smaller parties, particularly for the NDP, which were beaten by strategic voting efforts.
Pilon uses the BC Riding of Nanaimo – Ladysmith as an example: the head of the NDP, Lisa Marie Barron, fell to the conservative Tamara Kronis, which only had 35.2 percent of the votes. Meanwhile, the liberals, the PND and the greens combined for 64.4 percent.
“The reason we saw such decline for both the greens and the NDP has less to do with public trials about their effectiveness or desirability as parts, and everything that has to do with the type of jacket of the force that people felt that they were put, in terms of the strategy [voting] Dilemma they faced, “Pilon said.
While announcing his resignation as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau added that he regrets not being able to boost the electoral reform of the electoral ballot, citing a lack of consensus in the party lines.
He says that is why in cases like Nanaimo -Ladysmith, the supporters of the PND headlines probably felt that they had to “hold their nose” and vote liberal to stop conservatives.
NDP suffered important losses
Such voting strategies triggered heated debates among some progressives in the period prior to the elections. As the results realized Monday night, some voters published on social networks that wanted to have a classified voting 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, it must make a good sense of what everyone else is going to do, and that is what they cannot get,” Pylon said. “It is very unlikely to obtain good voting 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 that the classified ticket system still tends to channel the support for the largest parties, so that the defenders of the voting reform generally prefer the proportional representation, which would base the number of seats of a party in the Parliament on its percentage of the popular vote.
But Pilon says that the particular liberals would benefit from the classified ballots because they would probably have more people willing to qualify them in second place, while conservatives have less “adjacent parts” to extract, although he points out that some conservative profits in Monday’s elections may have reached the expense of the Popular Party of Canada.
The PPC captured only 0.7 percent of the votes, after obtaining approximately five percent in federal elections of 2021.
Trudeau promised a reform in 2015
During his first campaign as a liberal leader in 2015, Trudeau promised to eliminate the first -step system, where a candidate wins simply for having the most votes.
His government hit a special committee of all the parties of the Chamber of the Commons to review other voting systems, including the classified ballots, and published a report in December 2016 that recommended a referendum about a change to a proportional form of representation.
But the liberal parliamentarians did not agree, saying that the recommendations were “hurried” and “too radical”, and the plan failed.
The electoral reform was not on the 2025 liberal platform and the current leader Mark Carney has said that it is not a priority for his government.
In the direction at the end of the electoral campaign, liberal leader Mark Carney was asked about his thoughts about electoral reform. He said that if there is a process initiated to change the electoral methods of Canada, it must be “objective” not to “bow the scales in one direction or another.”
Pilon says that Australia is the only Western industrialized country that uses the tickets classified today, although Manitoba and BC used versions of classified tickets between the 1920s and the 50s, and federal liberals have played with the idea of electoral reform on several occasions that date back to 1919. Ireland also has its own version of a classified ballot.
In the 1952 BC elections, the liberal and conservative parties formed a coalition to keep socialism at bay, and introduced the ballots classified under the assumption that the voters who chose one of their parties would classify the other in second place.
Lydia Miljan, head of the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Windsor, says that the plan “failed” and led to the Social Credit Party to achieve a little victory.
“That tells you that voters are experts in this type of political manipulation, and that can change the calculation depending on how it is instituted,” he said.
Classified ballots could have given most liberals: professor
In 2025, Miljan says that a classified vote may have helped liberals to get the majority: the party landed in 169 seats, falling to only three less than a majority government.
“I don’t think I would have made a big difference, except probably in the few cables where there were three -way divisions, where there could be some more NDP seats and probably equally more liberal seats,” he said. “In that sense, you would have had a liberal majority, most likely.”
Andrea Lawlor, an associated professor of Political Science at McMaster University in Hamilton, says that although we cannot be sure of how voters would have ordered their preferences, it is possible that a classified ballot may have fundamentally changed the balance of power between the parties.
“In this choice, with such a short walk between a liberal minority and a liberal majority, the change in the margins could have had a dramatic impact,” he said.
Lawlor says he does not see that electoral reform becomes a problem in the near future, but suggests that politicians should carefully consider the possibility “if we want to see the continuation of the multiparty system as we know it, in an environment of growing polarization.”
