April 29, 2025 Election in Canada

It was advertised as “The most historic election in a generation.” It certainly was the most historic federal election in a decade.

And the most interesting.

For the last three years, the Liberal Party of Canada has been in a free fall in the polls. Only three short months ago, people were predicting that Pierre Polievre and the Conservative Party would easily win an election and probably form a majority.

Then along came Donald Trump.

And the rest is history. The Orangeman succeeded in uniting Canadians in a way I’ve not seen in my lifetime. His threats of annexation and punishing tariffs have driven most Canadians to a common cause. 

Unfortunately for the Conservatives, they were seen to align too closely with Mr. Trump and his divisive policies. I write the word, unfortunately, with some trepidation, the Conservatives could have found a way to capitalize on the newfound unity in the country. But after three years of negativity and attacks, Mr. Polievre was doomed to be associated with Trumpian politics. 

The results from across the nation speak loudly to the division and fear created by such politics. Yet almost half the people in our great nation voted for the Conservatives – 41 percent of the popular vote. The Liberals gained around half a million more votes, a 43 percent share of the vote. But the seat count doesn’t reflect the popular vote, with the Liberals gaining 169 seats and the Conservatives with 144. The remaining divided between the B Q the NDP and one lone Green MP. 

The current system of government doesn’t give full representation to those who didn’t vote for the victorious party. First Past the Post means that in a riding like Kelowna, the winner, Stephen Fuhr, won the seat by a narrow margin of under 200 votes. In Alberta, there were two ridings where the Liberals won and one where the NDP did. In those cases, the number of people who voted for the Conservatives was significant. So what happens to the people who didn’t vote for the Liberals? Why does their vote not count for anything? 

Proportional representation would fix a lot of the inequities in our voting system. In 2015, Justin Trudeau promised to make that election the last one ever decided by the first-past-the-post system. He said he would introduce proportional representation to Canada. Yet here we are, ten years later, and this still hasn’t changed.

Why?

We need to fix the divisions that continue to haunt our society. We never want to become anything like our neighbours to the south. We don’t want to be defined by who we vote for. At least in Canada, the leader who lost the election didn’t cry and whine, saying the election was stolen; he even lost his own seat in parliament and acted with grace. Yet there are people in fakebook land claiming election “irregularities.”  

Still, the question remains, what about people whose vote did not go to the winner in the riding they live in? We need to be brought together, and with the Liberals holding a thin minority government, we could end up back at the polls in the next year or two.  

Why not proportional representation? Why not give a voice to the people who feel unheard? 

I decided to research what happened ten years ago. Why did JT not follow through with his promise to change the way we elect our governments? An all party House of Commons committee was formed to study the idea and come up with recommendations.

There are a couple of reasons for the Liberals not following through, one being he realized that in proportional representation, a Liberal government would be weaker by having to share power with other parties. Indeed, had they had that system in place when he was elected in 2015, he would not have formed a majority government. Another reason they didn’t follow through was that the recommendation was to go to the public with a referendum on the subject. For some reason, Trudeau had no appetite to go to the Canadian People and ask what they wanted. So, proportional representation was the first of many Liberal election promises not to be completed.

At least they legalized weed.

That way, most of the public would be too stoned to care.

Here we are, ten years later, and a country that has been united by fear of Trump and American nationalism is at risk of being divided by the results of this historic election. If we’d had proportional representation, there was a likelihood that the Conservatives could have formed a government with the unlikely help of the Bloc Québécois – as ridiculous as that sounds. The NDP would have survived with more seats because many people would not have voted strategically for the Liberals to prevent a Conservative government. 

The vast majority of democracies in the world use proportional representation to elect their governments. Yet Canada and the UK stubbornly continue with a system that may well be decades out of date. 

At least we have more than two parties to choose from.

I don’t think that Prime Minister Mark Carney is interested in pursuing any changes to our electoral system, especially when his focus is where it should be – fighting back against Donald Trump.

In the end, I’m glad the election is over. I look forward to hanging with my friends and not worrying about who anyone votes for. 

I just hope we can unite as a country and bring everyone together – Canada Strong.