First Past the Post has played havoc with Canadian federal elections

Earlier this year, we wrote about Justin Trudeau’s regret at failing to deliver electoral reform during his near decade as Canada’s Prime Minister, despite first coming to power with a manifesto commitment to end First Past The Post (FPTP) for Canadian federal elections.

A lot has happened in Canadian politics since then. Trudeau has been replaced as Liberal Party leader and Prime Minister by Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England.

Carney has gone on to call a federal election for Monday 28 April. As we wait for the outcome, it is worth looking back at past Canadian federal elections and highlighting where FPTP has produced odd outcomes.

1993: Governing Progressive Conservative Party almost wiped out

One of the most infamous Canadian federal elections and perhaps one of the most startling election results anywhere, ever. At the previous federal election in 1988, the Progressive Conservative Party won 169 MPs (57.3% of seats) and formed a comfortable majority government. At the 1984 federal election, they had won 211 MPs (three-quarters of all seats). In 1993, they were virtually wiped out, with just 2 MPs being returned to the House of Commons.

The 1993 election saw both an increase in support for the biggest centre-left party, the Liberals and the emergence of a new right-wing party, Reform. This proved a disastrous combination for the Progressive Conservatives under FPTP. Reform won 18.7% of votes nationwide and picked up 52 MPs (17.6% of seats), mainly in the West of Canada. The Progressive Conservatives’ vote share fell to 16.0% but despite getting only slightly fewer votes than Reform, they barely clung on to representation in parliament.

Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, provides an example of how and why this happened. In 1988, the Progressive Conservatives won 46 of Ontario’s 99 seats. In 1993, they won no seats in Ontario, with the Liberals winning 98 of the 99 seats, from around 53% of the votes cast in the province. Reform picked up the other seat in Ontario, from around 20% of votes, with the Progressive Conservatives on 18%. Right-leaning voters in Ontario spread their support almost evenly between two parties, which FPTP translated into almost zero representation.

2011 & 2015: Single-party majority governments with under 40% of votes

In the past one hundred years, stretching back to 1925, Canadian federal elections have resulted in single-party majority governments on sixteen occasions. On thirteen of those occasions, the party that formed the single-party majority government got over 40% of votes nationwide and sometimes over half the votes cast.

However, the two most recent single-party majority Canadian governments have been formed by parties that received fewer than 40% of votes. In 2011, the Conservatives (formed from a merger of the Progressive Conservatives and Reform in the early 2000s) won 53.9% of seats with 39.6% of votes. At the following federal election, in 2015, the Liberals won 54.4% of seats with 39.5% of votes.

This reflects a long-term trend seen in a number of democracies, including the United Kingdom, for voters to increasingly support a wider range of parties, with votes less concentrated in two big parties.

Perhaps 2025 and the shock impact of Donald Trump’s Presidency on its next-door neighbour may see an increase in the ‘big two’ vote share. However, there is every chance the long-term trend could reassert itself, as it appears to have done in the UK, following the ‘big two’ surge at the 2017 and 2019 general elections, which followed the Brexit shock.

2019 & 2021: ‘wrong winner’ elections 

At both of the most recent Canadian federal elections, in 2019 and 2021, the Conservatives received more votes than the Liberals, albeit by a small margin on both occasions. However, at each of these elections, substantially more Liberal MPs were returned to parliament. In 2019 the Liberals led the Conservatives by 36 seats (157-121) and in 2021 the Liberals increased their lead to 41 seats (160-119).

This highlights another aspect of FPTP that prioritises some voters over others. Under FPTP it is not just the level of support for a party that matters but where that support comes from. If two bigger parties receive roughly the same level of support, but one party’s support is more concentrated in heartland areas, racking up massive majorities in some constituencies, but the other party’s support is more ‘efficiently’ spread across a wider range of areas, then the latter party is likely to win out.

This can be seen in action at the most recent Canadian federal election of 2021. The Conservatives were the only party to win over half the votes in any province, doing so in the Western provinces of Saskatchewan (59% of votes), where they won all 14 seats and Alberta (55% of votes), where they won 30 out of 34 seats.

However, in Ontario (where 36% of Canadian MPs are elected), a narrow 4-point lead for the Liberals over the Conservatives in terms of votes (39%-35%) translated into more than double the number of MPs (78-37). This 41-seat Liberal lead across Ontario matches the 41-seat Liberal lead across Canada as a whole. In Canada’s most populous province, the Liberals managed to get 64% of seats from fewer than 40% of votes.

First Past the Post has been a real engine of chaos in Canada, randomly throwing up parliaments that bear little resemblance to how Canadians voted. It doesn’t have to be like this, a system of proportional representation (PR) would end this postcode lottery where the location of a party’s support can matter more than its overall level of support.

Would you like to see Westminster adopt a fairer voting system?