The NDP must fulfill Justin Trudeau’s broken promise on electoral reform
Canadians are sick of a system that forces them to vote against a party rather than for it

Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Photo by Jeanne18/Wikimedia Commons.
The Justin Trudeau era of Canadian politics is over. Accordingly, Canadians are appraising the achievements and failures of his time in office, and one issue keeps coming up: his broken promise to end Canada’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. While Trudeau abandoned this commitment all the way back in 2017, the issue has endured because Canadians understand that our electoral system fails to accurately represent the will of voters. But this Trudeau failure is an opportunity for Jagmeet Singh and the NDP to become the outspoken champions of electoral reform.
Some have suggested that the electoral reform ship has sailed given that Trudeau broke his promise eight years ago and has been rewarded with multiple governments since. But if this was the case, Trudeau himself wouldn’t have been speaking about the issue in his final days. As recently as October, on a podcast with Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Trudeau expressed regret that he walked away from electoral reform. And even more importantly, in his resignation speech to Canadians, he singled out the issue as one of his major failures.
Justin Trudeau says his only regret is not changing electoral reform to ‘bring Canadians together.’ Is this a joke? He’s the most divisive Prime Minister in Canadian history. The audacity to rewrite his legacy while standing in the rubble he created is absolutely sickening. pic.twitter.com/seSzlob0HT
— Marc Nixon (@MarcNixon24) January 6, 2025
It should be made clear that Trudeau still rejects proportional representation—a system where parties get seats based on their vote percentage—and continues to partially blame opposition parties for his own inaction. He still prefers a ranked ballot system—where you number your preferred candidates in order on your ballot—which would not have made “every vote count” as he pledged in 2015. A recent article from NDP MP Matthew Green and Joseph Gubbels showcases Trudeau’s flawed approach to reform.
Nonetheless, this all this goes to show that even Trudeau understands how poignant electoral reform is, and how worried he is that it will be seized by opposition parties like the NDP to energize Canadians. This is where Singh must make Trudeau’s fear a reality.
The NDP has included electoral reform in its platform in the past, but it is often buried quite deep in the party’s list of commitments. This is a mistake. At this moment, where Canadians are facing the spectre of a false Conservative majority, many are again asking why Trudeau left us in this predicament, and how we can fight back. This requires the NDP to take the lead immediately, and pledge to implement proportional representation if they form government.
Proportional representation via a system like mixed member proportional not only helps Parliament reflect the will of voters, it also preserves the local election of MPs that many Canadians value. Under such a system, you will still have your one, local MP that you can meet with, but also additional regional MPs who represent the views of citizens more broadly. The arrangement is even designed so that while regional seats are allocated to parties, voters can choose which party candidate gets the seat, ignoring the party list system that some countries with proportional representation have.
Proportional representation will also ensure more cooperative government more of the time. Canadians saw many encouraging outcomes from the recent NDP-Liberal cooperation agreement, made possible by a minority Parliament. But proportionality would make this scenario more common, leading to more policies that benefit working class Canadians. Additionally, it will make false majorities essentially impossible, meaning that 35 percent of the vote no longer equals 100 percent of the power. Smaller parties could either form coalition governments to represent their voters, or block the most dangerous legislation from a governing party that doesn’t have 51 percent support.
Another under-appreciated benefit of electoral reform is greater national unity and regional cooperation. One of the flaws of FPTP is that it exaggerates party support in regions, shutting out all others in wide swathes of the nation. In 2015, for example, the Liberals won every seat in the four Atlantic provinces, even though Conservatives and New Democrats got significant vote shares in the region. Similarly, provinces like Saskatchewan sometimes send only Conservative MPs to Parliament, despite the fact that they have well under 100 percent of the provincial vote total.
More Conservative MPs in urban cores, and more Liberal and NDP MPs in the Prairies, would mean all parties would be better poised to understand the particular issues facing those diverse communities. Parties would also have to compete more widely for votes. FPTP often marks many ridings as “uncompetitive” (where only one party has a realistic chance of winning) meaning parties would waste resources trying to flip them. Under a proportional system, however, parties would benefit winning an extra five percent of the vote in these communities, incentivizing wider campaigns.
All of these are principled reasons to support reform, but there are partisan reasons for the NDP, as well.
First, the policy of electoral reform may not be a central issue compared to health care and housing, but it does motivate the NDP base, and is an important one among highly-engaged voters: the very sort of people who are paying attention to politics now, as opposed to wider audiences during the writ period. If Singh wants to build some energy quickly, taking a bold electoral reform stand could help to energize supporters.
Second, electoral reform is an issue that could help Singh cut through media coverage that may well be dominated by the looming Liberal Party leadership race. If Singh wants to capture eyeballs while the Liberals tears themselves apart, this is a good maneuver.
Third, electoral reform is especially poignant in ridings where the NDP competes with the Liberals for seats. In those ridings, many orange-red swing voters are deeply supportive of reform, and are what you might call “Anything But Conservative” voters. They are especially sick of a system that forces Canadians to vote against a party rather than for it. They can be won over by the same promise that convinced many of them to vote Liberal in 2015, except this time Singh will be much clearer in his details to implement an historic change.
Finally, electoral reform is about curing cynicism within our politics. Even those who supported Trudeau over the years were repulsed by how his electoral reform lie represented the worst of our politics: how it was proposed to trick voters, and later abandoned because the Liberals unexpectedly won under the current dysfunctional system. A similar outcome happened in Québec, where the CAQ under François Legault won a majority and promptly abandoned their electoral reform pledge.
Canadians are begging for leadership that does what is says. With a strong push from Singh and the NDP, they can succeed where Trudeau fumbled.
Christo Aivalis is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.