Justin Trudeau’s ‘One Regret’ Is Not Implementing Ranked Choice Voting in Canada
As he heads for the exit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his “one regret” is not overhauling the voting system Canadians will use to choose the next parliamentary majority.
“I do wish that we’d been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country so that people could simply choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot,” Trudeau said in his resignation statement earlier this week.
He’s talking about ranked choice voting, which has been adopted in two American states and a few dozen smaller jurisdictions. Under that format for deciding elections, candidates must get a majority of the votes cast (rather than simply getting the largest plurality, as in the more widely used first-past-the-post system). The candidate with the fewest votes in the first round of counting is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to other candidates depending on those voters’ second choice. The process repeats until someone has a clear majority.
Trudeau said that a ranked-choice system means “parties would spend more time trying to be peoples’ second or third choices, and people would be looking for things they have in common.”
That’s a small but vital change. Under a first-past-the-post system, candidates have no incentive to be a second choice, since voters are only able to vote for one option—even if they see that option as merely the lesser of two evils, as is often the case.
That incentivizes a lot of nasty things like the negative partisanship that has come to define so much of American politics lately—and, apparently, Canadian politics too, though I’m sure they are more polite about it. That, in turn, might be contributing to the decline in satisfaction with democracy on display across most of the world right now. In Canada, for example, Gallup found that just 52 percent of people are satisfied with democracy in 2024, down from 66 percent a few years ago.
An electoral system that incentivizes can
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