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Canada Is Edging Toward a Two-Party System. That Would Be a Mistake

As polarization deepens, keeping the field crowded matters more than we think

I’ve been following the New Democratic Party leadership contest on and off— on when it’s interesting and off the rest of the time. It’s more interesting than you might think.

The race doesn’t seem to be a coronation, there are strategic and ideological differences between the candidates, and everyone seems to be raising money. The fundraising numbers suggest that there’s more interest in the party than you might expect or have predicted a few months ago, when so many people were writing off the orange side as a goner. By the end of March, the party will have a new leader and, one hopes, a new energy to bring to the House of Commons and, god help us, an early election if one should come to pass.

The NDP doesn’t have much time to lose, as rumours of an early election creep across Ottawa like a metaphor in a T. S. Eliot poem. I don’t think an election is likely any time soon, but who knows. In the meantime, federal polls suggest a polarized electorate similar to the one we saw during the election this past spring, with voters split between the Liberals and the Conservatives, with everyone else left behind in the dust. If the trends persist—and we have no idea whether they will—the Canadian party system could shift to a more thoroughly two-party system in which the third, fourth, or fifth parties wither and die in all but name. And maybe in name too.

In some theories of our first-past-the-post system, this shift is what’s predicted to happen. Why, after all, would you have parties who can’t win in a system designed in such a way that suppresses them? Why wouldn’t........

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