Mark Carney is in the midst of the longest political honeymoon in Canadian history, one whose duration can be explained at least in part by his willingness to borrow ideas and policies from his Conservative opposition. From pipelines and energy to tax cuts and military spending, he has governed — and sounded — more like a Progressive Conservative than the Liberals he helped save from electoral oblivion in 2025. It has helped him build one of the biggest polling leads in Canadian history, and effectively neutered Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in the process. Now, it’s time for him to borrow an idea that tends to belong to the left: electoral reform. 

Quebec’s provincial election provided the latest example of why our first-past-the-post system is no longer fit for purpose. The Parti Quebecois won 28 per cent of the popular vote but ended up with 59 seats — nearly half of the national assembly’s overall representation. The Quebec Liberal Party won 24.2 per cent of the vote and received a third of the seats, but the Quebec Conservative Party, which received 20.7 per cent of the vote, only ended up with 15 per cent of the seats. The Coalition avenir Québec — which had been in power since 2017 and went into the election with 79 seats — came away with zero seats despite more than one in seven Quebeckers voting for them. 

One wonders if the CAQ leadership regrets reneging on the promise it made back in 2018 to reform the province’s electoral system before thinking better of it, as tends to be the case when parties outside of power suddenly win it. They weren’t regretting it in 2022 when they won 72 per cent of the seats with just 41 per cent of the votes. But as the first-past-the-post gods give, they can also take — and the CAQ didn’t get........

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