This electoral philosophy revealed for many the cracks in our first-past-the-post system
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
It’s voting day. The polling station is down the street from your house; only a five minute walk away. You’ve done your research, consulted numerous local and national polls — as all voters do — and have decided who you’re voting for.
Your favourite candidate? They have little chance of winning, unfortunately. You’ve opted to go with the candidate statistically most likely to beat the one you really, really don’t want.
Under our current electoral system, this was the experience of many Canadian voters in this year’s federal election. They knew what party they didn’t want forming government, but not everyone felt they had the luxury to vote for who they truly supported.
Canada’s electoral system is as simple as it is complicated. Single-member plurality, more commonly known as first-past-the-post (FPTP), has been the system which our elections are built on. It is the voting system used federally and provincially in Canada. Constituents vote on a ballot, listing candidates from various parties who are running in their constituency.
Under FPTP, the candidate who receives the most votes — which is not always the majority of the votes — gets a seat in the House of Commons and is recognized as a Member of Parliament (MP).
This past federal election, held on April 28 earlier this year, was the most recent example which demonstrates the results of FPTP.
Not only did the federal election in April determine the party which will be representing Canadians on the federal level — a Liberal minority government led by Mark Carney — but it also saw the rise of many voters voting strategically, rather than for their preferred candidate. The combination of FPTP and strategic voting led to major changes in the political makeup of Vancouver Island, and reaffirmed for many the limitations of our current electoral system.
A political shakeup
The recent federal election saw Vancouver Island’s political landscape shift dramatically. The only two returning incumbents were Courtenay–Alberni MP Gord Johns (NDP) and Saanich–Gulf Islands MP Elizabeth May (Green).
Incumbent New Democratic Party (NDP) MPs were unseated by Conservative challengers in North Island–Powell River, Nanaimo–Ladysmith, and Cowichan–Malahat–Langford, while Liberal MPs replaced them in Victoria and Esquimalt–Saanich–Sooke.
Vancouver Island now has a much wider array of representation, from six NDP and one Green MPs in 2021 to one NDP, one Green, two Liberals and three Conservatives in 2025.
Laurel Collins, the former NDP MP for Victoria, lost her seat of almost six years to Dr. Will Greaves, an associate professor of political science at UVic and now Liberal MP.
The drastic shift in Vancouver Island’s political makeup has sparked discourse about strategic voting and the FPTP electoral system.
“The story we saw on Vancouver Island was that folks overwhelmingly did not want Conservatives to get elected, which might come as a surprise,” said Prym Goodacre, a recent graduate from UVic, in an interview with the Martlet.
“But actually,” she said, “the story is that the vote was split nearly down the middle between the NDP and the Liberals”
Goodacre has been involved in local politics in Victoria for about four years. During the last City Council election in 2022, she made a series of posts on her Instagram account to inform others about candidates’ platforms, so they could make an informed decision about who to vote for.
“People started … looking at my Instagram stories,” she said. “I kept on doing that because I had a lot of fun with it, and people seem to like it.”
In this past federal election, Goodacre noticed those who would normally vote for the NDP voted instead for the Liberal party because, she said, “they were worried about the Conservatives getting elected.”
This resulted in a number of losses for the NDP, losing 18 seats in the House of Commons — seven of which went to Liberal candidates — and, due to dropping below the required 12 seat threshold, even losing official party status.
The vote for Liberal candidates over NDP candidates on Vancouver Island was seen as strategic by some voters, as a way to prevent the Conservatives from winning enough seats to form government.
“That is a reflection of the fact that there are many Conservative voters on Vancouver Island,” said Greaves.
He said that in all three Conservative ridings on Vancouver Island, Conservative candidates got the most votes, but fell short of the majority of the votes. In these three ridings, the highest vote share won by a Conservative candidate was Aaron Gunn, MP for North Island–Powell River, with 38.7 per cent. Tamara Kronis (Nanaimo–Ladysmith) and Jeff Kibble (Cowichan–Malahat–Langford) earned 35.5 per cent and 37.2 per cent of the vote, respectively.
“More progressive parties … were supported by the majority of the voters in those ridings, but they split the vote,” Greaves said. “We see … the shortcoming of the first-past-the-post system at work in the three ridings that Conservatives won on Vancouver Island.”
Many Canadians — not only on Vancouver Island, but across the country — used strategic voting to make a choice for their country. Goodacre told the Martlet that this choice was an “unfortunate necessity that first-past-the-post forces onto voters.”
Strategic voting is an informal practice often used to vote for individuals in an effort to eliminate other candidates. When voting strategically, people often overlook the person running in their constituency, and look ahead towards the government that they want formed in Parliament. It often means overlooking their preferred candidate as well, in favour of one they may not like, but think has the best chance of avoiding a result they do not want.
In the view of some Canadians, it is the only tool they think they have when trying to stop a candidate from winning.
In this past election, people used voting resources, such as the websites Smart Voting and VoteWell, intended to inform citizens what the strategic vote in their riding was to prevent a Conservative victory. But a lot of these resources did not take local polling data, or the strength of individual candidates, into account, leading many voters to receive misleading information.
“It was a real struggle to let these folks know that actually in a lot of these ridings [on Vancouver Island], the strategic voting choice was the NDP or was the Greens,” said Goodacre.
Vancouver Island having one Green and six NDP ridings before the federal election led to a greater diversity of perspectives represented in the House of Commons.
“But that was clearly not a very accurate representation of the actual political views of the people living on Vancouver Island, who are not universally NDP-supporting with a small side of Green,” said Greaves. He said that the current ridings’ results more accurately represent the diversity of political views on the island.
The benefit of electoral reform is that it would avoid this ‘either-or’ scenario — preserving both diversity of perspectives in Parliament, and ensuring the diverse range of views within communities are represented, too.
This year, in part due to the prevalence of strategic voting, both the NDP and the Greens lost seats, leading to a greater consolidation of seats under what many see as the two ‘main’ parties in Canada — the Liberals and the Conservatives.
“The NDP suffered from a move in the direction of strategic voting for the Liberals by NDP supporters, in an effort to secure … the end goal, which was a not not-Conservative government,” said Dr. Penny Bryden, a professor of modern Canadian history at UVic.
On top of strategic voting, Goodacre said that the NDP put out an uninspiring campaign, and failed to meaningfully distinguish themselves from the Liberal party.
“A lot of that comes back to failures of party leadership,” said Goodacre.
For some voters, like Kate Smith, a second-year engineering student at UVic, voting strategically can help inform who they will vote for in a given election. “I think that’s a super valid strategy,” she said.
But for others, it leads to unfortunate complications in the election process.
“Voters often vote [strategically] out of fear that a disliked party will win,” said Constance More, an affiliate of FairVote Canada — a non-profit movement for electoral reform — in an interview with the Martlet “They have to struggle to determine which party is actually favoured to beat that other party.”
Ann Remnant, another affiliate of FairVote Canada, told the Martlet that strategic voting emphasizes a negative approach to political engagement in place of a positive one.
“[A voter’s] little piece in politics is about stopping someone, and not expressing what we actually want,” said Remnant.
And even then, there is little guarantee that voters will see the party they want forming government.
“It’s easier to calculate what a strategic vote looks like in terms of your own MP … then it is to calculate the national picture, Greaves said, because it’s “complicated, and [there’s] a very high level of uncertainty because of the other 343 ridings across the country,”
In this year’s case, strategic voting ended up being “disastrous” for the NDP. This was not because its supporters did not like the candidates anymore, but because a vote for the Liberal party was seen as being strategic.
A two-party system?
While Canada is ostensibly a multi-party country, the Liberal party and the Conservative party are often perceived to be the ‘main’ parties in the country, and were considered to be the two main voting options this past election.
“A lot of folks see this as a two-party system,” said Goodacre.
Smith told the Martlet that the Liberals and Conservatives are considered to be the two “main fish,” and the Greens and NDP are supposedly the two minor parties.
Some Canadians consider the NDP, Greens and Bloc Quebécois the country’s “third parties.”
Since the founding of the NDP in 1961, Canadians have acknowledged the presence of the party and seen it as a viable option to vote for at all levels of government, but it has been largely relegated to forming provincial governments, and participating in coalitions at the federal level.
Currently, two Canadian provinces — B.C. and Manitoba — have majority NDP provincial parliaments and are run by NDP Premiers. They have, however, been unable thus far to form a federal government.
Bryden said that because of the NDP’s undeniable presence in Canada’s political landscape, the country’s multi-party system can be viewed as a three-party system. “Although … this last election totally upended that expectation.”
For those who did not want a Conservative government, strategic voting was successful, as it resulted in Mark Carney winning the election and forming a government. But for the NDP and their supporters, it produced calamitous results.
So, why did Canadians choose to ignore other parties when voting this past federal election?
“It has to do with mirroring the situation in the United States,” said Bryden. “We’ve internalized an American model … we impose that model on Canada and think then about two parties.”
The political structure of the United States is designed for a two-party system, including the way their elections are held.
Even though the US also uses FPTP, it does so under a vastly different political and electoral system than we use in Canada.
“Part of it is inhaling the American political reality, rather than thinking about the Canadian political system,” said Bryden. She said that Canadians are influenced by American media, not just news, and they see the American and Canadian systems as inherently the same.
Continued use of FPTP in Canada encourages a system similar to the US.
“First-past-the-post delivers polarizing results, moving us more to a two-party system, despite having a breadth of party choices on the ballot,” said More.
In Remnant’s view, FPTP is created for a two-party system and leads to less diversity in the House of Commons.
Electoral reform
FPTP remains controversial today, and many are campaigning for electoral reform.
“There’s a constant … chatter about the need for electoral reform,” said Bryden. According to Bryden, electoral reform is easy to talk about politically, but not as easy to implement.
“The only ones who ever want to change the system aren’t in power, and that’s not a position that enables [change],” she said.
The last time electoral reform was championed by a party leader was by Justin Trudeau, during his 2015 campaign for Prime Minister. However, after winning the election, he quickly dropped electoral reform.
“Once he won a majority, that became a non-issue,” said Bryden.
Electoral reform has been a challenging issue to get through, in part because candidates and parties aren’t incentivized to change the system that brings them favourable results, and also because of the variety of options available.
According to an EKOS poll released in January 2025, 68 per cent of Canadians support introducing proportional representation –– an electoral system that reflects voters’ choice in the proportion of seats that a party gets in an elected body. If a party gets 30 per cent of the votes, for example, they get 30 per cent of the seats.
Currently, under FPTP, a party can win a majority in government with far less than half the popular vote, so long as they receive more seats than any other party.
Advocates for electoral reform argue this does not reflect what Canadians actually want. In ridings where a voter’s preferred candidate has little chance of winning, they may feel their vote “doesn’t matter,” and may be discouraged from political engagement as a result.
Another popular type of electoral reform is the introduction of ranked-choice voting — a method where voters rank a number of candidates in order of preference. If their first choice candidate doesn’t win, their ballot isn’t “wasted” — it applies to the next candidate on their list. Ranked-choice voting is used in a number of jurisdictions in the United States, in both primary and major elections, and was recently used in Australia’s federal election.
“Ranked-choice and proportional representation both encourage voting, get people feeling that their voice actually matters in politics, and more accurately represent what the Canadian population wants,” said Goodacre.
And, unlike FPTP, proportional representation is not complicated. People vote for their favourite candidate or party, and aren’t required to think strategically, or to research the most-likely-to-win candidates in a given election.
Proportional representation also makes smaller parties stronger, and empowers them in a way that FPTP does not.
Proportional representation strays away from a two-party system and could allow Canada to thrive in its multi-party system, where parties like the NDP and the Greens would not fall victim to strategic voting, allowing their supporters to feel represented in parliament.
FairVote Canada promotes a citizens assembly to make decisions about how to proceed with the process of reforming our electoral system.
Remnant told the Martlet that the biggest barrier is the lack of information about the electoral system, which continues to benefit the politicians who gain power through FPTP. She said that education about Canada’s electoral system should start in schools.
“We’ve done to politics what we did to math… it’s almost cool not to understand these things, and we’re really doing ourselves a disservice [by doing] that”
Greaves told the Martlet that it’s one thing to support electoral reform, and another to know which kind of reform would be best for Canada’s electoral system. In order to change the electoral system, Greaves said, Canadians first need to understand how FPTP works.
According to Greaves, the best type of electoral reform for Canada would be a ranked ballot system, to elect the candidate who is the most desired in a community.
Historically, changes to the franchise — the right to vote — have been slow and modest and usually take place to someone else’s advantage — whether that be politicians or citizens. Bryden said that big changes, such as lowering the voting age and extending the right to vote to women, took place when it was politically necessary or beneficial to politicians.
Bryden said that electoral reform — towards proportional representation — will be more likely if it becomes politically advantageous or necessary, as the result of some kind of crisis or challenge to the current status quo.
Even an incremental change to proportional representation from FPTP could accurately reflect who Canadians want in parliament. Remnant suggested having a supplemental ballot for every fifth ballot that went out for voters to have a chance to vote in a proportional representation system.
Critics say FPTP is a “demoralizing” and “dissatisfactory” system. However, with proportional representation, or a ranked-choice system, Canadian voters could have a better chance of making their voices heard in Ottawa.
