How electoral reform could shatter party fortresses

Voters make their way to a polling station to cast their vote in the federal election in Saskatoon on Friday, April 28, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Liam Richards

OTTAWA — A change to Canada’s electoral system would have delivered a very different House of Commons this year — one without the monolithic regional strongholds held by both major federal parties — according to an analysis for The Canadian Press.

One seasoned political observer in Alberta says shattering those party fortresses could help take some of the steam out of efforts to ramp up separatist sentiment.

Halifax-based MQO Research took poll-level results from last month’s election and ran them through Brazil’s proportional representation model, assigning seats in each province based on the popular vote.

Under such a system — and according to the votes Canadians cast using the existing process — Alberta wouldn’t be as solidly blue, Nova Scotia wouldn’t be overwhelmingly red and the NDP wouldn’t be losing official party status in the House of Commons.

“You wouldn’t have giant, monolithic representation in any one area. You would have a little bit more speckle,” said Brenden Sommerhalder, president of MQO Research.

“Every party got sliced in a weird way at least somewhere this last election, because of first-past-the-post.”

Canada’s first-past-the-post system awards each riding to the local candidate with the most votes, regardless of how popular their party is provincially or nationally.

The system leads to distortions. In Alberta, for example, 28 per cent of voters cast ballots last month for the federal Liberals — who won just 5 per cent of the province’s seats. The Conservatives won 64 per cent of votes in the province but took 92 per cent of Alberta’s seats.

In Nova Scotia, meanwhile, the Liberals took 91 per cent of the seats with just 57 per cent of votes. The Conservatives won just one of 11 ridings in Nova Scotia, despite taking more than a third of the votes in the province.

According to MQO’s calculations, the Brazil model would have given Nova Scotia four Tory MPs instead of one, six Liberals instead of 10 and a single NDP MP instead of none.

In Alberta, the model still would have given the Conservatives most of the seats — 24 instead of 34 — but the Liberals would have 10 MPs instead of just two.

University of Alberta law professor Roderick Wood said the disparities generated by Canada’s current electoral system could be helping to drive Western alienation.

“What first-past-the-post does is create a distortion,” said Wood. “It accentuates these regional difficulties.”

Wood said that while he is not an expert in electoral reform, he did help draft the recommendations in the 2004 report by the Law Commission of Canada on electoral reform, based on expert research.

He said the “high level of dissatisfaction” in rural Western Canada with the federal Liberals and the nascent separatist movement in Alberta are being driven by many factors outside the electoral system.

But those factors are aggravated, he said, by an electoral system that tends to turn small leads into massive regional sweeps — like the one in the 2021 federal election that saw the Conservatives win every one of Saskatchewan’s 14 ridings.

“It makes it seem that the support is more monolithic than it really is, and so it leads to one particular party, like in Saskatchewan and Alberta, totally dominating,” he said. “When the government in power forms, you don’t have representatives from that province in the government.”

And the problem goes beyond a lack of Prairie voices around the cabinet table in Liberal governments, Wood said. Parties can also take regions for granted, he said, by concentrating heavily on swing ridings — pulling attention and resources away from regions they see as either easy pickings or not worth the effort.

“It’s not just a Western phenomenon,” he said. “All the concentration is on the ridings which might actually flip.”

He said an electoral system that more accurately reflects the votes cast could give Saskatchewan and Alberta more durable clout in Ottawa, undercutting some of the simmering resentment driving Alberta separatism — even though it wouldn’t solve long-standing issues around resource development.

According to MQO’s calculations, the parties’ seat counts in Manitoba, New Brunswick following last month’s election would have been the same under the Brazil model. So would the seat distribution in the three territories, which each have just one riding.

Nationally, the Liberals would be further from majority status, with 151 seats instead of the 170 they currently hold, while the Conservatives would add one seat to their current 143 and the NDP would have 22 MPs instead of just seven.

The Bloc Québécois would have the same number of seats, following this week’s flip of the Terrebonne riding to the Liberals.

But the People’s Party would have gained its first-ever elected seat, in Ontario. That province also would have elected one Green and six NDP MPs, instead of none. The Conservatives would have taken two more seats in Ontario and the Liberals would have taken 10 fewer.

Under the Brazil model MQO used to process the poll results, voters choose a party-affiliated candidate and seats are awarded to each party proportionally, based on their total vote share in each province. The party seats would then be filled by candidates who won the most votes.

Sommerhalder said his firm used the Brazil model because it maintains voters’ ability to vote for individual candidates — even though it doesn’t include geographic ridings.

All electoral systems come with trade-offs, Sommerhalder said. Other systems preserve distinct geographic ridings, such as the mixed-member proportional system used in Germany — another federal state with strong regional identities. In that system, voters elect their local MP and also vote for a party, which gets an allocation of seats it can choose to fill with no geographical considerations.

Sommerhalder said the problem with the current system is that it allows a party to form government with a small fraction of the votes, provided it targets the right ridings.

“There is a bit of a chasm between what Joe Public might think ought to happen based on an election results and what really does in first-past-the-post,” Sommerhalder said.

Wood said he was discouraged by how the governing Liberals handled the issue of electoral reform in 2016, when he testified before a House committee studying the issue. He said it was clear to him at the time that the Liberals wanted a system of ranked-choice ballots — which he said would not solve the biggest problems with first-past-the-post.

“It doesn’t create any kind of proportionality. In fact, it has the potential for making the problems of the present system even worse, in terms of artificial majorities and regional disparities,” Wood said of ranked-ballot systems.

The Liberals have been accused of hypocrisy ever since then-prime minister Justin Trudeau promised that the 2015 election that brought him to power would be the last to use first-past-the-post. Trudeau later claimed there wasn’t enough public consensus on how to reform the electoral system.

His opponents have accused Trudeau and the Liberals of sabotaging progress toward an electoral system that might have been less generous to their party.

Canada’s current electoral system often prompts progressives to resort to strategic voting — to back the candidate who seems to have the best chance of preventing a Conservative win, instead of choosing their preferred party.

Many NDP candidates have railed against the practice, arguing it benefits the Liberals at the expense of smaller parties. NDP incumbent Peter Julian did call on Liberal supporters in last month’s election to support him in the riding of New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville, arguing he was in the best position to win.

He finished second, about 2,000 votes behind the Liberal candidate, and less than 70 votes ahead of the Conservative.

Vancouver-based Research Co. conducted an online survey of 1,201 Canadian voters from April 27 to 29, immediately after the election. It suggests that 58 per cent of respondents want the federal government to implement proportional representation.

Millennial poll respondents — those born between 1981 and 1996 — voiced the highest level of support for proportional representation, at 67 per cent. Support dipped to just below half among those born before 1965. A quarter of respondents said they were not sure about electoral reform.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Canadian Research Insights Council, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

In recent years, some electoral-reform advocates have taken to nominating scores of protest candidates, leading to very long ballots. The Longest Ballot Committee says it does this to draw more public attention to their cause, after the Liberals dropped the issue in 2016.

The group wants a citizens’ assembly put in charge of crafting a new electoral system, arguing that political parties are reluctant to make the government more representative of a diverse electorate. But critics say the committee’s efforts are themselves undermining democracy.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 14, 2025.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press