The 2025 Ontario election was a race for second place. The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario led by Doug Ford cruised to a third consecutive majority government, winning 80 seats, down three from the last election.
The vote also exposed oddities in the electoral system, as the Progressive Conservative majority came despite the party winning only 43 per cent of the popular vote. In an election where only 45 per cent of eligible voters showed up to the polls, the party won a strong majority with only 19 per cent of eligible voters.
Even stranger, the Ontario Liberals won 29 per cent of the popular vote but only 11 per cent of the seats.
What would the legislature look like with a different voting system? Almost two decades ago, there was a proposal to radically changed elections in the province that failed in a referendum on reform.
In 2006, a Citizens Assembly recommended a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system. In 2007, the MMP system was rejected when 63 per cent of Ontarians voted to keep the First Past the Post (FPTP) system.
In MMP, each ballot has two votes. People vote for a local candidate and their preferred party. The legislature would then be made up of local MPPs people drawn from a list prepared by the political parties and made public before election day.
Here is what the Ontario legislature might look like under MMP based on the original 2006 Citizens Assembly recommendations. This system includes 129 total seats, with 90 seats filled by local candidates and 39 list seats, where candidates are decided by the percentage of the popular vote won by the party. A party would need to win at least three per cent of the popular vote to gain a list seat.
Jon Pammett, a professor of political science at Carleton University, favours proportional representation, “because it promises the fair representation of the votes into the legislature.”
Proportional representation usually results in parties forming coalitions because a majority government is a less likely outcome, though he added that one challenge of this is that negotiating a coalition can take a long time.
“You’d have to have a population that was accepting of a big negotiation amongst the political parties after the elections in order to form a government. Sometimes these negotiations, when they occur, can take quite a long time to work out.”
According to Pammett, one reason that electoral reform didn’t pass in the 2007 referendum was that there wasn’t a significant trigger to justify changing the system.
“There hadn’t been a crisis of some sort that had produced it. So there were a lot of discussions about, well, ‘Why is this all happening?’ ‘What’s the point?’ Oh, ‘how much is it costing?’ Things of that sort. And so there never was a real groundswell of public support in favor of a change or the need for a change,” he said.
But there are multiple groups still advocating for what they see as a more fair voting system across Canada. Fair Vote Canada, a national organization, is campaigning for a national Citizens Assembly, which would create a plan for electoral reform at the federal level. They also back proportional representation in Ontario.
Ontario’s first-past-the-post system has been challenged in the courts, as being unconstitutional. The case failed at the Ontario Superior Court but is heading to the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Fair Voting BC, one of the group’s behind the challenge, argues the first-past-the-post system interferes with Section 3 and Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — the right to vote and equality rights. They argue Section 3 is violated because parties can win the majority of seats with a minority of the vote, so constituents’ interests are underrepresented. They say Section 15 is violated because parties are incentivized by the current system to avoid risks on candidates which pushes hopefuls from more marginalized communities out of politics. A court decision is expected this spring.
