Would Ranked Ballots Have Changed Monday's Result? Political Scientists Weigh In

In the Vancouver Island riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith, the NDP's incumbent, Lisa Marie Barron, lost her seat on Monday to Conservative Tamara Kronis, who won with 35.2 per cent of the vote. The Liberals, NDP and Greens together took 64.4 per cent. It is the kind of result that sent some voters to social media as the returns came in, saying they wished Canada had a ranked ballot.

CBC News put a question to political scientists: what would Monday's election have looked like under that system? The question has a personal edge for Justin Trudeau, who said after announcing his resignation in January that abandoning electoral reform was his biggest regret. He said he wished Canadians could choose a second or third choice on the same ballot, and argued that parties would then compete to be voters' backup picks and would look for common ground rather than polarize. Under a ranked ballot, sometimes called an alternative vote, a candidate without a clear majority on the first count is decided by counting second-choice votes until someone passes 50 per cent.

Dennis Pilon, a York University political scientist who studies electoral reform, said the smaller parties, especially the NDP, would not have been hit so hard. He pointed to Nanaimo–Ladysmith as an example. In his view, the slump for the NDP and Greens had little to do with voters' judgments of the parties and a great deal to do with the strategic-voting dilemma that felt like a straitjacket. Supporters of NDP incumbents, he said, likely felt they had to hold their noses and vote Liberal to keep the Conservatives out. He also noted that strategic voting is hard to do well, because it requires knowing what everyone else will do, and reliable polling for an individual riding is very unlikely.

The NDP fell from 24 seats to seven and lost official party status. Pilon cautioned that ranked ballots still tend to channel support back to the biggest parties, which is why reform advocates generally prefer proportional representation, where seats follow the share of the popular vote. He said the Liberals would likely gain from ranked ballots because more voters would rank them second, while the Conservatives have fewer adjacent parties to draw from. He added that some Conservative gains Monday may have come at the expense of the People's Party of Canada, which took 0.7 per cent of the vote after about five per cent in 2021.

Lydia Miljan, head of political science at the University of Windsor, said a ranked ballot might have helped the Liberals reach a majority. They finished with 169 seats, three short. She did not expect a big difference overall, except in ridings with three-way splits, where the NDP and Liberals might each have picked up a few more seats. In that case, she said, a Liberal majority was most likely. Andrea Lawlor, a McMaster University associate professor, said no one can know how voters would have ordered their preferences, but with such a short walk between a minority and a majority, change at the margins could have had a dramatic impact.

The history is not encouraging for reformers. Trudeau promised in his 2015 campaign to end first-past-the-post, where the candidate with the most votes wins. His government created an all-party House of Commons committee, which reported in December 2016 and recommended a referendum on a form of proportional representation. Liberal MPs called the recommendations rushed and too radical, and the plan fizzled. Pilon said Australia is the only Western industrialized country using ranked ballots today, though Ireland has its own version, and Manitoba and B.C. used versions between the 1920s and '50s.

B.C.'s 1952 election offers a warning. The Liberals and Conservatives formed a coalition to keep socialism out and introduced ranked ballots, assuming their voters would rank the partner party second. Miljan said it backfired, and Social Credit won narrowly. Voters, she said, are savvy to this kind of manipulation.

Electoral reform was not in the Liberals' 2025 platform, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has said it is not a priority. Lawlor does not expect it to become an issue soon, but said politicians should consider it if they want the multi-party system to survive increasing polarization.