Photo by D’Arcy Norman/Wikimedia Commons

There are so many headline takeaways from the 2025 federal election: the loss of what had appeared to be a sure-fire Conservative victory, the dramatic resurrection of Liberal party fortunes under new leader Mark Carney, and collapse in voting support for the country’s third parties: the Greens, Bloc Québecois, and especially the NDP. The impact of Trump’s threats to annex Canada and impose harsh tariffs on Canadian goods has been clearly underlined by most commentators as driving these results. But less attention has focused on just how Canada’s electoral institutions made responding to such threats much harder and less democratic than they should be. If we look beyond the headlines, the key challenge facing voters in this election was really all about strategic voting. Canada’s single-member plurality (SMP) voting system simultaneously amplifies the pressure for voters to vote strategically while denying them adequate information to do so effectively. And the real shame is, there would be no need to vote strategically at all if we used a more representative, inclusive and ultimately democratic voting system—in other words, some form of proportional representation.

Let me backtrack to sketch in a bit more about what strategic voting is and why it dominates elections under our voting system. The whole point of representation in a supposedly democratic system is that people should vote for what they want to see taken up politically. This is what voting theorists call a ‘sincere’ vote. But the voting system you use can influence whether people decide to vote sincerely or not. When you vote in an SMP voting system the results are ‘winner take all’ for the candidate who achieves the most votes. If there are just two in the running, one will probably attain a majority. But with Canada’s multiparty system, many seats are won with just a plurality (more votes than any other single candidate but not a majority). Now voters have to weigh up not only whether voting sincerely would get them what they want but whether it might inadvertently help elect someone they really........

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