Canada Is Edging Toward a Two-Party System. That Would Be a Mistake

I’ve been following the New Democratic Party leadership contest on and off— on when it’s interesting and off the rest of the time. It’s more interesting than you might think.

The race doesn’t seem to be a coronation, there are strategic and ideological differences between the candidates, and everyone seems to be raising money. The fundraising numbers suggest that there’s more interest in the party than you might expect or have predicted a few months ago, when so many people were writing off the orange side as a goner. By the end of March, the party will have a new leader and, one hopes, a new energy to bring to the House of Commons and, god help us, an early election if one should come to pass.

The NDP doesn’t have much time to lose, as rumours of an early election creep across Ottawa like a metaphor in a T. S. Eliot poem. I don’t think an election is likely any time soon, but who knows. In the meantime, federal polls suggest a polarized electorate similar to the one we saw during the election this past spring, with voters split between the Liberals and the Conservatives, with everyone else left behind in the dust. If the trends persist—and we have no idea whether they will—the Canadian party system could shift to a more thoroughly two-party system in which the third, fourth, or fifth parties wither and die in all but name. And maybe in name too.

In some theories of our first-past-the-post system, this shift is what’s predicted to happen. Why, after all, would you have parties who can’t win in a system designed in such a way that suppresses them? Why wouldn’t the system tend toward two parties who compete to win? Oh, I’m so glad you asked!

I’m not going to bother with the political science here, as fun as that would be, nor am I going to debate the merits and demerits of FPTP or electoral reform. I’ve done plenty of that. But if we take the current system as a given, at least for now, then what about third and fourth and fifth parties? Do we need them? Do we need an NDP? I offer a thorough and enthusiastic yes to each and every question related to the multi-party system, and please let me do so in the time it takes you to drink your coffee (or, if you insist, tea).

Why a multi-party system in Canada? For one, other parties can win. I’m not saying you should put money on it, but it could happen. It’s not much beyond a decade ago that the NDP had a serious shot at forming government federally. Events can and do happen, and the electoral math shifts accordingly. The Liberals were the moribund ones in those days, and had things gone differently, who knows—we might be asking today if we need a Liberal Party. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Progressive Conservatives were having their own crisis as the right split in Canada. A Quebec separatist party became the official opposition. Politics is weird. Things happen. Things change.

Even if third (etcetera) parties don’t win, they still shape parliaments, agendas, policies, laws, and political culture. The NDP, for instance, has been essential in building out the Canadian welfare state for decades, including health care (in its various iterations and conceptions) and the national pension scheme. Most recently, the NDP helped secure guaranteed paid sick days for workers in federally regulated industries and delivered, at sweet last, a federal anti-scab law. During the global financial crisis, the NDP pushed the minority government of Stephen Harper to offer supports for workers and families affected by the crash. I’m sure the right could offer examples from the Conservative side, just as the Bloc Québécois and Greens could. Examples abound. Pick and choose as you please.

• Carney Thinks He Can Make Government Work Again. Good Luck with That
• The NDP Can’t Call Itself a National Party If Its Leaders Can’t Speak French
• The Undeclared Civil War Inside Poilievre’s Conservative Party

These third, fourth, fifth, etcetera parties also represent different constituencies within the country; indeed, they’re representative of diversities within Canada: ideological, class, linguistic, regional, identarian, and more. You could, in theory, fit all the multiplicities of Canada into two parties, but someone would be getting a raw deal in the bargain. The so-called brokerage parties (whose status as such varies), well, broker to win. Or try to.

Not everyone is comfortable with the politics of pragmatism or chasing the often-illusory centre. Any “unity” such a party would produce would be transitory and begrudged at best. To borrow from another poet, that centre would not hold.

At this point, I could mention the United States and its two-party system, but I’ll leave those arguments and nuances, such as they are, to your imagination. Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t trade Canada’s Parliament, parties, party system, or political culture for those of the Yankees for all the hamburgers in the land. Perhaps that’s damning us with faint praise, but there you have it.

We can’t say for sure what’s happening with the Canadian party system for the long term. We don’t know what it, and Parliament, will look like in six months, a year, or two years, let alone a decade from now. Who would have predicted a Stephen Harper Conservative majority government looking up from the ashes of the 1993 federal election? Who’d have predicted the “sunny ways” of the Justin Trudeau Liberals in 2015 from even just four years earlier, when Michael Ignatieff led his party to an electoral drubbing of just thirty-four seats?

We can say, or at least argue, that a House of Commons made up of several parties tends toward a more robust and varied legislature that better captures the diversity, tensions, disagreements, and struggles of the country. We can say, or argue, that such a Commons produces better outcomes. I certainly think so. Accordingly, we ought to be very careful in resisting the urge to predict or wish the end of the multi-party system in Canada. In committing to preserving or hoping to preserve this system and its diversities, the party you save might be your own.

Originally published as “Against the Two-Party System” by David Moscrop (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.