The results of this coming Monday’s federal election might make Canada a bit more like the U.S. in one significant respect.
They might nudge this country toward a U.S.-style two-party system.
Canada has had two main parties, Liberal and Conservative, since its founding in 1867.
But for more than a century, since the end of World War I, other parties have consistently been in the mix. Those smaller parties have often played an outsized role in the governance of Canada.
In the 1920s, the main third party was the agrarian-populist Progressive Party, which favoured free trade with the U.S.
At that time, both of the traditional parties supported a protectionist policy designed to foster a nascent Canadian manufacturing sector.
The Progressives, on the other hand, wanted Canadian farmers to be able to buy low-cost U.S.-made equipment. The Canadian government had imposed steep tariffs on such products.
By the 1930s, the Progressives were fading away, but, in the depths of the Great Depression, two new parties emerged.
Social Credit was a right-of-centre populist party, which advocated a much-disputed monetary policy that amounted to solving economic problems by printing more money.
The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), founded in Regina Saskatchewan in 1932, was a social-gospel-inspired democratic socialist party.
All three of these parties gained at least a foothold in the federal parliament.
And all three were even more successful provincially, where they have won enough support to form government in a number of provinces.
The CCF, which changed its name to the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961, proved to be the most enduring.
While the other two are long gone from the political scene, the NDP currently forms the government in two provinces and is the official opposition (the second largest party) in three others.
These days there is also a small Green Party, with two seats in the House of Commons,
and a party that advocates for the independence of Quebec, the Bloc Québécois.
NDP leveraged its balance-of-power position
The Bloc only runs candidates in the 78 Quebec ridings (electoral districts), but last time, in 2021, they won 32 of those seats.
In 2021, the New Democrats only won 25 seats of the 338 seats in the federal House of Commons. But they have enjoyed influence far in excess of that relatively small number.
That’s because of another feature of the Canadian system which will be foreign to Americans, what we call minority government.
When no party wins an outright majority in the House of Commons, that is, 50 per cent plus one of the seats, we could get a coalition government, where two or more parties join forces and share power.
They have had such coalitions a few times in Britain. The most celebrated and successful was Winston Churchill’s World War II coalition. The most recent British coalition happened when David Cameron’s Conservatives joined forces with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in 2010.
In Canada, however, we don’t do coalitions. Here, when no party wins an outright majority in an election, the party with a plurality of seats governs, on its own, as a minority.
Minority governing parties depend on the votes of one or more of the other parties to pass legislation, on a piece-by-piece basis.
In our Westminster system, some items of legislation – any, for instance, that entail spending money – constitute matters of what we call confidence. If a governing party loses a confidence vote it falls. There then must be an election, or another party has to take over – although the latter scenario has been extremely rare.
For two terms, following the elections of 2019 and 2021, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals governed as a minority. They had the most seats in the House, but fell short of an absolute majority.
For the most part, the Liberals depended on the New Democrats to put them over the top. The Bloc had more seats than the NDP, but was not interested in playing ball with Trudeau.
The New Democrats used their balance of power position to wrestle concessions from the Liberals.
Among those were: an increased federal minimum wage, indexed to inflation (currently $17.75 / hour); the beginnings of a national pharma-care program (to be negotiated with the provinces); enhanced federal investment in low-cost housing; and a federally-funded dental care program (also to be negotiated with the provinces).
Many Canadians’ overwhelming concern is resisting Trump’s annexation threat
There have been many minority governments in Canadian history, especially over the last 68 years, since 1957.
Those with long memories can remember the highly productive Liberal minorities of the 1960s and 1970s.
Those governments, with the votes of New Democratic members, gave us Canada’s contributory pension plan (equivalent to U.S. social security), the universal health care schemes to which Canadians are fiercely attached, Canada’s distinctive red Maple Leaf flag, this country’s first department of the environment, and an agency for international development assistance.
Many Canadians will tell you they think minority governments are the most responsive and effective kind.
They do not worry too much about the instability of minority governments, which constantly face the prospect of falling on a confidence vote. Rather, they appreciate the fact that government seems to work harder for the people when no single party has 100 per cent of the power.
But this time, in 2025, attitudes have changed.
Donald Trump’s oft-repeated threats to annex Canada have polarized Canadian politics around the two main parties: the currently in-power Liberals whose leader, Mark Carney, replaced Trudeau in March, and the somewhat Trump-ish right-to-far-right Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre.
Opinion polls indicate that both the Liberals and Conservatives have increased their support vis-à-vis the last election in 2021, while the NDP appears to have dropped to less than half the support it had in the last election.
In 2021 the New Democrats won close to 18 per cent of the popular vote across the country. And their vote was much higher in some provinces, notably British Columbia on the west coast, where they placed second, with over 25 per cent of the votes.
Opinion polls now put the New Democrats at somewhere between eight and 11 per cent nationally. And most of the NDP’s losses have been gains for the Liberals.
It appears that progressive voters want to rally around the one leader they believe has the skill and experience necessary to take on Trump. That person is the Liberal, Carney.
The new Liberal leader offers reassurance and a steady hand
Mark Carney is new to politics. He has never been elected to any public office. His career was in finance and banking. There he rose to the top, as Governor of the Bank of Canada and, after that, of the Bank of England.
Before and after his career in public service Carney worked for two of the world’s biggest investment banking firms: New York based Goldman Sachs and Toronto-based Brookfield.
Mark Carney is almost certainly the wealthiest person ever to hold the office of Prime Minister in Canada. But he doesn’t comport himself like the billionaires who surround Trump. He has none of their arrogant swagger.
Onscreen and in person Carney appears earnest, serious, thoughtful and candid.
He does not sound like a typical politician. When Carney speaks, one gets the impression he is saying what he actually thinks, not spouting partisan talking points.
A good many Canadians, it appears, have decided Carney is just the kind of leader we need now, especially when his main opponent, Pierre Poilievre, is 100 per cent a professional politician, through and through.
Poilievre started his career as a Conservative backroom staffer, got elected to Parliament in his 20s, and has never held a job in any field other than politics.
When the Conservative leader speaks, he mostly mouths rehearsed slogans and catchphrases. The only time Poilievre gets truly spontaneous is when he snaps at journalists he doesn’t like – a group that seems to include all of the news media except far-right outlets such as Rebel news.
Middle-of-the-road and progressive voters find the prospect of Poilievre in power, with Trump running the show in Washington, to be genuinely scary.
That’s one reason they’re flocking to Carney.
Before Trump decided to target Canada, and before the Liberals replaced Justin Trudeau with Carney, Poilievre was way ahead in the polls.
Poilievre had managed to harness widespread dissatisfaction with inflation, especially the scarcity and high price of housing, into a big lead.
During that time, the Conservative leader worked hard to keep his naturally angry and divisive personality under wraps – and succeeded, for the most part.
But Donald Trump abruptly changed the channel on that effort.
Inflation is still an issue for many Canadians. Now, however, the biggest concern for the largest block of voters is to keep Canada free and independent. That’s a challenge few Canadians expected they would ever have to face.
Mind you, if polls are accurate, Poilievre is still attracting more support than the 34 per cent his party got in 2021, under a different leader. His Conservatives consistently poll from three to five points above that now.
The trouble for Poilievre is that the Liberals appear to have gained about half of the support that previously went to the NDP, as well as some that had gone to the Bloc and the Greens.
That puts the Liberals somewhat over 40 per cent, and bodes well for a Carney victory.
But it also looks like the next Parliament will have rather few voices other than the two biggest parties.
Canada’s parliamentary rules deem that to have official party status a party must have 12 seats, and that status is a big deal.
Official status means money for research and staff, seats on House of Commons committees, and the right to ask questions in the daily question period (when opposition members get to grill government ministers).
The Bloc seems to have dropped in support and appears to be way behind the Liberals in Quebec. But it will likely win more than the minimum 12 seats.
The row is going to be tougher to hoe for the New Democrats.
As the campaign comes to an end, NDPers and their leader, the affable and perennially hopeful Jagmeet Singh, are focusing exclusively on winnable seats, mostly those they now hold.
If the NDP fails to make the 12-seat threshold on Monday it will not be the first time. In 1993 the party won only 9 seats. But it returned to party status in the next election, in 1997, and by 2011 had become the official opposition, the second-place party, with over 100 seats.
It’s a cliché, but here’s an ebb and flow in politics. The tide goes out, but it also comes in.
Right now, however, erstwhile NDP voters seem to think the need to rally around a Canadian champion to battle Trump outweighs the need to have a strong voice for the Left in Parliament.
We’ll get to know how it all shakes down on Monday evening.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
