Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Photo by Jeanne18/Wikimedia Commons.

The Justin Trudeau era of Canadian politics is over. Accordingly, Canadians are appraising the achievements and failures of his time in office, and one issue keeps coming up: his broken promise to end Canada’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. While Trudeau abandoned this commitment all the way back in 2017, the issue has endured because Canadians understand that our electoral system fails to accurately represent the will of voters. But this Trudeau failure is an opportunity for Jagmeet Singh and the NDP to become the outspoken champions of electoral reform.

Some have suggested that the electoral reform ship has sailed given that Trudeau broke his promise eight years ago and has been rewarded with multiple governments since. But if this was the case, Trudeau himself wouldn’t have been speaking about the issue in his final days. As recently as October, on a podcast with Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Trudeau expressed regret that he walked away from electoral reform. And even more importantly, in his resignation speech to Canadians, he singled out the issue as one of his major failures.

Justin Trudeau says his only regret is not changing electoral reform to ‘bring Canadians together.’ Is this a joke? He’s the most divisive Prime Minister in Canadian history. The audacity to rewrite his legacy while standing in the rubble he created is absolutely sickening. pic.twitter.com/seSzlob0HT

It should be made clear that Trudeau still rejects proportional representation—a system where parties get seats based on their vote percentage—and continues to partially blame opposition parties for his own inaction. He still prefers a ranked ballot........

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