How Justin Trudeau Killed PR for a cycle

Recently (on the 27th of Feb 2025) an election was held in the province of Ontario, my place of residence. The most important part of the results is that the ruling party of the Progressive Conservatives under Doug Ford got about 42% of the vote, got about 60% of the seats, and therefore earned themselves 100% of the political power in the province for four years thanks to the First Past The Post (FPTP) rules of the election system.¹ It was a cynical snap election call and Ford was rewarded for it, evidence of an unhealthy society and a broken election system.

This outcome is pretty much exactly what advocates of a proportional system like me decry as undemocratic as, under proportional systems (henceforth called PR) getting about 40% of the votes means a party gets about 40% of the seats and has to negotiate power with other parties. Another fun bit of factual ammunition that came out of the election was the NDP party getting about 11% less of the vote than the Liberals (around 600K votes less) and yet getting double the number of seats as them.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's a mess.

And Justin Trudeau had promised to fix it at the federal level by 2019.

This is an accounting of how he broke the promise, and lied about it until the end of his career as Prime Minister of Canada

The Runup to 2015

I got involved in volunteering my free time to advocate for PR in 2007. I say this to not only establish that I have some personal experience in the matter, but also that, until the runup to the Canadian Federal Election in 2015, there was incredibly little interest from most Canadians on the issue.

So what happened in 2015?

The blowback of 2011 happened in 2015.

See in 2011, the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper got a little less than 40% of the vote, got about 53% of the seats, and therefore earned themselves 100% of the political power in Canada for four years thanks to the FPTP rules of the election system.² Apologies for being repetitive, but I am trying to reinforce a point here.

And by 2015, Stephen Harper was hated³, the country was asking the question about why the election system had given him so much power, and not liking the answer (FPTP). To the point that election reform, usually a point of discussion that only severe policy wonks care about, became a big enough issue that Justin Trudeau promised that 2015 would be the last FPTP election.⁴

The initial sleight of hand to notice here is that Justin Trudeau never stated what he would replace FPTP with. Just that it would be replaced. PR, making an incredible amount of sense even in the initial pitch (you need to get more than 50% of people to vote for you to get majority power), is the most obvious replacement but Trudeau's official statement was completely silent about that.

Justin gets X% of the vote, Y% of the seats and 100% of the power

So in 2015 the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau got a little less than 40% of the vote, got about 54% of the seats, and therefore earned themselves 100% of the political power in Canada for four years thanks to the FPTP rules of the election system.⁵ 🤪

And that Liberal majority, combined with the Canadian political tradition of deferring to the party leader, meant that Trudeau was in complete charge of what would happen next.

Enter the Special Committee (acronym ERRE for some reason)

The House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform (ERRE) , comprised of the recently elected Members of Parliament (MPs) was setup in 2016 to deliver on Trudeau's promise. Maryam Monsef, then a rising star in the Liberal party, and Minister of Democratic Institutions, was responsible.⁶ Initially it was made up of a majority of Liberal MPs, but after criticism this was changed. I do credit the Liberals for this and it was particularly useful in understanding what was to come.

So four months of committee work later, more than 87% of the citizen submissions, 88% of the experts, and 69% of the town halls, advocated for a switch to some form of PR.⁷

Seems like a open and shut case. So... why is Canada still using FPTP?

Well the committee's report to parliament is very instructive. Recommendation 12 was for a proportional system to be designed and a referendum be held.⁸ But what is incredibly bizarre was the Liberal members of the committee, elected in part on the promise for reform by 2019, split from everyone else they served with, and felt the need to add a 'supplemental report' that contradicted the main report and essentially ignored all of the submissions and testimony and citizen engagement in favour of PR.⁹

Exit the Special Committee, enter the broken promise

So it was obvious right from the end of the committee that something was seriously wrong with the ruling Liberal party's approach. If they were truly dedicated to evidence based decision making, then, well, the evidence was in. Something else was going on.

Then the Liberal party launched a truly odd online survey website¹⁰ to solicit feedback from Canadians which didn't even ask what kind of system they would prefer.¹¹

Then Monsef attacked the report of the ERRE by accusing the committee of failing to provide a specific alternative when that was not in the committee mandate, and then lambasted a mathematical formula used by political scientists to measure proportionality.¹²

This was such a disaster that she was shuffled out of her position, a new minister Karina Gould was appointed, and then Justin Trudeau instructed her not to pursue electoral reform.¹³

So after three separate attempts to manipulate or kill electoral reform from the shadows (first by the Liberal MPs on the ERRE, then by shifting attention to mydemocracy.ca, then having Monsef attack the ERRE), Trudeau finally came clean as to why he did what he did. He preferred something called 'ranked ballot' (which he hid on the campaign trail) and when he didn't get it, ignored the overwhelming evidence in favour of PR in preference to his own half baked theories on electoral systems and broke his promise instead.¹⁴

What the heck is a ranked ballot?

A 'ranked ballot' is a, from what I can tell, uniquely Canadian terminology that injects an additional layer of confusion onto what is already the pretty complicated topic of electoral reform. It is a way to refer to an electoral system which is most clearly referred to as Instant-runoff voting (IRV) but also known as Alternative Vote (AV).¹⁵.

The reason why calling it 'ranked ballot' is confusing is because having a ranked ballot is not an election system in and of itself, it's just a component of one. And there is a PR system called Single Transferrable Vote¹⁶ that also uses ranked ballots.

Suffice it to say, Trudeau's pet system of IRV was supported by less than 5% of the submissions to the ERRE.⁷ Which may be a part of the motivation for his Liberal MPs attacking the committee with such vigour.

Much of what I have recounted here is also in an excellent article from the CBC which also highlights the fact that a referendum is not even necessary to change an election system.¹⁷

The final lies

In a podcast in October 2024 Trudeau explained his reasoning for why he broke his promise extensively on a podcast¹⁸ he admitted his lie by omission by making it seem like he was ever open on the idea of PR in 2015, and also made statements about PR that are blatantly untrue.¹⁹ Whether those are deliberate lies or just incompetence does not really matter. What matters is that Canadians elected Justin Trudeau to fix the crisis of democracy that had foisted Stephen Harper's majority government onto Canadians.

His failure to do so when he had a clear mandate will haunt Canadians until the topic forces its way back into the public consciousness, as it is destined to do due to the bizarre results FPTP creates regularly, and we finally get the reform for PR that we need and deserve.

I just wish we didn't need to be subjected to the most severe of crises before these opportunities come again.