Canada’s political party system has historically been described as a “two-and-a-half party system”, reflecting the dominance of the two main parties – the Liberals and the Conservatives – as well as the more minor influence of an occasional third party who can influence the balance of power. Since Confederation in 1867, Canadian prime ministers have only ever come from the Liberal or Conservative Party.
The durability of the Liberal-Conservative hegemony has been tested over the last three-and-a-half decades but the results of the 2025 federal election only serve to consolidate, though perhaps briefly, the Canadian two-party system.
1993-2004: Splintering and Challenges the Liberal-Conservative Order
1993 marked the first real test of the two-party system when the ruling Progressive Conservative Party fell from a majority government, overtaken by three third parties.
The Liberal Party emerged victorious with 177 seats, 60% of the seats in the House of Commons. They won 41.2% of the vote, far ahead of the second closest party, the Reform Party who won 18.7% of the vote. The party did particularly well in seat-heavy Ontario, winning 98 of the 99 seats.
Bizarrely, the collapse of the PC vote allowed the regional Bloc Quebecois to become the official Opposition party. This is despite the fact they only ran in Quebec so naturally had a low ceiling, where it was mathematically improbable for the party to win the most seats.
Notably, the third-placed party was the Reform Party, a right-wing party which largely dominated the western provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, winning 52.3% in the latter to the Tories’s 14.6%. A more populist alternative to the faltering Progressive Conservative Party, its objective to displace the governing party was successful, winning 52 seats compared to a paltry two for the PCP – a Tory slump from 169 at the previous election.
Despite losing 35 seats, the New Democratic Party (NDP) still outperformed the PCP for the first time in the party’s history.
In all, the Conservatives lost 154 seats, falling from a majority government to two seats, with prime minister Kim Campbell losing her Vancouver Central seat to the Liberals. This result meant the party fell from official party status, losing access to additional funding, speaking time, and committee assignments. The party won just 16% of the vote, with a swing against the party of 27%.
In 1997, the Conservative Party regained party status by winning 20 seats but remained the fifth largest party, with the Reform Party becoming the official Opposition and cementing its status as the new party of the right. For the 2000 election, the Tories brough back former PM Joe Clark though this did not help, with the party falling to 12.2% of the vote and losing seats.
The Progressive Conservative Party finished fifth in three straight elections and allowed the Liberals to govern without a worthy and credible opposition.
It was not until 2003 and the Unite the Right movement, in which the Progressive Conservatives unified with the Alliance (the rebranded name of Reform). The 2004 election returned the party as the Official Opposition, with the Liberals and Conservatives winning nearly two-thirds of the popular vote and holding three-quarters of the seats.
2011-2015: An Orange Wave Washes Out the Red
Another substantial challenge to the established two-party model occurred in 2011.
In the election of that year, Jack Layton’s NDP became the official Opposition for the first time, winning over 30% of the vote and over a third of the seats (they had previously never won more than 15%). By contrast, it was the worst-ever result for the Liberals, who won just 18.9% of the vote and 11% of the seats, marking their worst election result ever, with leader Michael Ignatieff, only the third time that the Etobicoke-Lakeshore seat was not won by the Liberals in its 47-year history.
The NDP did particularly well in the Liberal Party’s Quebec stomping grounds, taking 59 out of the province’s 75 seats, winning across Montreal and Quebec City.
In all, the NDP won 103 seats, their new personal best, beating their 43 seats in 1988.
With prime minister Stephen Harper becoming increasingly unpopular, the NDP benefitted. In the 2015 election campaign, the NDP, led by Tom Mulcair, were ahead in polls throughout August and up until mid-September thought the election returned the Liberal and Conservatives as the two largest parties by a wide margin, collectively winning 71.4% of the vote and 83.7% of seats.
In the 2019 and 2021 elections, the winning Liberal Party could not form a majority so third parties had some influence but failed to collectively win more than 20% of seats.
2025: A Two-Party Consolidation
The 2025 election returned the clearest-cut two-party result in Canada since the Second World War.
Though no party had won over 40% since 2000, the squeeze on minor party was so great that both major parties crossed this threshold: the Liberal Party with 43.8% and the Conservatives’s scored 41.3%. Both parties had not crossed 40% since 1930 – 95 years previously!
Both parties also won a combined over 85% of the vote for the first time since 1958.
Both parties had improved their standings, with the Liberals winning 17 seats and the Conservatives winning 24; no third party flipped any seat. There was a swing of 11.1% to the Liberals and 7.6% to the Tories. Collectively, they won over 90% of seats.
At the electoral level, Canada’s effective number of parties declined from 3.8 to just 2.7, the lowest level since 1958. This is comparatively higher than nations like Germany (6.6), Australia (5.3), and even Britain (4.7), which similarly uses the first-past-the-post model.
Despite their drubbing, the inability of the Liberals to gain a majority meant that third parties still held the balance of power. However, they did little to act this before April 2026, when, after a series of defections and by-election victories, the Liberals clinched a governable majority of seats.
Notably, while Canadian third parties who won less than 15% of the vote were able to have influence on the government’s survival, in the UK election of 2024, where third parties won 43.5% of the vote, they were entirely shut out as one party gained 63% of seats (on only 33% of the vote).
The NDP: Orange Crushed
Though the Conservatives fell short of victory despite a 25-point poll lead at the start of the year and having a 99% chance of forming a majority for 18 months prior, the NDP were the party that had the worst night.
The party crashed down from 24 seats to just seven, its worst-ever result. Its few seats also meant it fell from party status, meaning it lost access to additional funding, limited parliamentary speaking time, and stripped of committee assignments. It won just 6.3% of the vote, down from 17.8% in 2021. Even the Bloc Quebecois, which only runs candidates in Quebec, won more votes.
Moreover, in NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s Burnaby Central riding, he came a distant third, facing -21.6% swing against him.
Even among the few seats it did win, some MPs were only re-elected by the skin of their teeth. In Nunavut, Lori Idlout retained her seat by just 41 votes while Don Davies, a former Shadow Cabinet Minister, held onto his long-held Vancouver Kingsway riding by just 0.6%.
Even worse, just 46 of the party’s 343 candidates achieved the 10% threshold to qualify for a campaign rebate, leaving the party financially crippled.
The Liberals and Conservatives nipped at the party’s base from both sides.
One obvious factor in this was the Trump threat that had hung over the election. The newly elected president had not only placed hefty tariffs on the nation but threatened annexation, leading to a boost in nationalist sentiment that aided the Liberals while the Conservatives presented them to be best-placed to deal with Trump due to closer ideological links as well as campaigning on the unpopularity of the Trudeau years. Amid such an existential threat to the nation, voters saw the election as a two-horse race, with minor parties largely shut out from discussion. While the two major parties polled around a collective 65% in December, the election would return a combined 85%, the CBC points out.
Another potential factor was the inability of the NDP to influence policy under the 2022-2024 Liberal-NDP confidence and supply deal. The NDP not only got little out of the deal but had kept their leader while the Liberals had switched from the unpopular Trudeau to Mark Carney, whose professional, experienced, technocratic leadership style was more appealing than one who had already proved his vacuum of influenced. A similar trend can be seen in the dismal results of Britain’s Liberal Democrats after their undersized role in the 2010-2015 Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.
Thirdly, the Liberals undoubtedly benefitted from tactical voting on behalf of NDP to prevent a victory of ‘Trump-lite’ Poilievre. As political scientist Alex Marland noted: “A big reason for people who would have voted NDP ending up voting Liberal was really because of fear over Donald Trump.” One example is in the Carleton riding in Ontario, where Liberal Bruce Fanjoy unseated Tory leader Pierre Poilievre in a major embarrassment. Fanjoy won with a 19.1% swing, far higher than the national swing, and the NDP candidate dropped to just 1.4% of the vote. An Angus Reid poll found that 50% of 2021 NDP were switching allegiance to support the Liberals this time around.
As for the Conservatives, they cut into two crucial bases of the NDP: young voters and blue-collar workers.
In 2021, the NDP obtained 32% of 18-34-year-olds, making them the most popular party among that age group though an Abacus poll taken just over a week before the 2025 result showed their had crashed to third among the demographic with 12%. In a separate Nanos poll, it was found the Conservative Party was winning with 49.7% in this age range. A commonly cited key factor in this is the housing crisis, with a generation of young voters feeling locked out of accessing the basic necessities that their parents and grandparents experienced. Poilievre would be particularly appealing to young men for his plain-spoken character: an intellectual, anti-woke nerd, not a million miles away from manosphere commentators like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk.
Moreover, the Conservatives managed to woo over many working-class, blue-collar voters. Among the ridings the NDP lost were strongholds Windsor West, where the Tories won for the very first time, and Elmwood-Transcona, which the NDP had held for 33 of its 37-year existence. Much like younger voters, the focus on the cost-of-living resonated with workers who felt the NDP had lost its way. As Richard Cianto of iPolitics put it: “Once a champion of working-class Canadians, [the NDP] has become a Liberal auxiliary force, rubber-stamping everything from deficit spending to climate policies that alienate its traditional base in resource-dependent regions… Working-class Canadians, and rural populists in BC and Ontario, once loyal to the NDP’s economic populism, now flock to a CPC focused on affordability and jobs.” These overtures, including pledges of tax cuts, jobs, and housing, earned the party election endorsements from labour unions comprising of electrical workers, plumbers, carpenters, boilermakers, and steelworkers, amongst others.
The Bloc Quebecois: Separatist Sacre Bleu!
From the party’s first election in 1993 until 2011, the Bloc were the largest party in Quebec, winning an average of just under two-thirds of seats. After their slump in 2011-2017, new leader Yves-Francois Blanchet brought the party back to party status and from fourth in the province to second.
In 2025, the party dropped 13 seats to 22 as the Liberals won 12, bringing them to 44, the Liberals first majority in Quebec in a decade. As for the BQ, it was their third-worst result in the party’s history. Its vote dropped from 32.1% in 2021 to 27.7% while the Liberals achieved a 9% swing from 33.6% to 42.6%. The Liberals did particularly well in gaining seats in Montreal. Their success here is all the more impressive considering the flak Mark Carney got for his percieved subpar grasp on the French-Canadian language.
Polling from Leger, rating an A+ polling site by 338Canada, show that the Bloc were leading in the province by about 11-13 points. However, after the New Year, the Liberal Party surged ahead.
The Liberal Party’s boost on their ability to ride a nationalist wave seemed to harm the pro-independence BQ. The party were not aided by comments made by leader Blanchet that were out of touch with the rising patriotic sentiment when calling Canada an “artificial country with very little meaning”, comments that obtained much media coverage and criticism.
It was not all bad for the party however, as they did win one seat, taking the Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Listuguj riding from former Cabinet minister Diane Lebouthillier. Moreover, the party lost, but only by a single vote, in the seat of Terrebonne. The Supreme Court would later nullify this vote due to a misprint error, forcing a by-election. Unfortunately for the Bloc, incumbent Carney remained extremely popular, enough to win the seat in the subsequent by-election, this time by 668 votes.
Since the election, Quebec separatism seems to have eased, with a Leger/Journal de Montreal survey finding it was at its lowest level of support since the 1995 referendum with just 29% wanting to become independent.
The Green Party: Wilting in the Wilderness?
Although more of a fringe party, the Greens are a notable presence in Canadian politics, fronted by seemingly eternal leader Elizabeth May.
May had been the first elected Green MP, leading the party from 2006-2019 and 2022-present. She had been the only permanent fixture of the party in the Commons, with other MPs often either defectors or defecting. In 2025, she once again became the sole Green MP, down from their peak of three in 2019.
In 2021, Mike Morrice had won the Kitchener Centre seat for the Greens, benefitting from sexual misconduct allegations that had sunk incumbent Liberal Raj Saini’s re-election bid. This was in spite of a national slump in the Green vote, declining from a record 1.19 million to just under 400,000. In 2025, he lost his seat by under 400 votes to Conservative Kelly DeRidder in what local press described as an “upset”.
May, however, retained her 14-year riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands in British Columbia, increasing her percentage of the vote and remained 5,800 votes clear from her closest competitor. The party performed best in BC, as per usual, winning 3%.
That was the extent of the party’s real success, with the party’s co-leader Jonathan Pedneault finished fifth in his Outremont riding in Quebec.
Nationally, the party won 1.2% of the vote, down from 6.49% just two cycles ago
Despite May being the party’s only representation, she continued to prove her influence. In previous parliaments, she was a delegate to COP21, created a national framework to address Lyme disease in a private member’s bill, and was the sole voice against intervention in Libya. In 2025, May was the key vote in passing the 2025 federal budget.
It is notable that the Green Party of Canada is far less successful that other Green Parties in major western democracies. In Germany for example, the party is often a key part of a progressive governing coalition – most recently serving as Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Secretary in the previous government – while the UK’s Green Party, under the leadership of eco-populist Zack Polanski has frequently been shown in polls to be leading both the Conservatives and Labour.
The People’s Party: Is That Thing Still Around?
The People’s Party is, by this point, so fringe as to be questionable whether it really has any role in Canadian politics.
The party arrived with much hype in 2018, formed by former Conservative Cabinet minister Maxime Bernier. The party is a populist party to the right of the Tories.
At the last election, the People’s Party won nearly 5% of the vote, double that of the Green Party. Though the party did not win any seats, they came second in seven seats and their popularity was enough to cost the Conservatives as many as 24 seats, according to analysis from CBC News Labs.
However, in 2025, the party crashed down to just 141,200 votes, down from 841,000.
In a journal in the Canadian Review of Sociology, Efe Peker, Emily Laxer, and Remi Vives note how some of Poilievre’s more conspiratorial and fringe ideas have cut into the People’s Party’s base. They note: “These ideological oscillations may be a response to electoral imperatives stemming from broader shifts on the Canadian right since the Harper years, including the rise of populist/far-right/libertarian movements…[such as] Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada, whose federal vote share shrank from 4.9 percent in 2021 to 0.7 percent in 2025.”
The party’s policy similarities to President Trump also wounded the party in an anti-Trump election. These include his opposition to immigration, multiculturalism, environmentalism, LGBTQ+ protections, and the healthcare system. They also celebrated being the only party opposing retaliatory tariffs against the US, something supported by 75% of Canadians, via Pollara.
The irrelevancy of this party is shown by the party not being invited to engage in the leadership debates.
In light of their results, pundits have questioned the viability of the party going forward. Over three elections, it has never won over 5% of the vote, never won a seat, and seemingly lost a sizable chunk of its base. As critics such as former Progressive Conseravtive PM Brian Mulroney note, all Bernier seems to have done is help the Liberals continue their march in government.
A Year On: What Has Changed?
With the election long gone, prospects still appear dim for all parties, except the Liberals.
Though the Bloc improved their vote share in the Terrebonne by-election, they lost to the Liberals by a larger amount, from 1 in 2025 to 668. In the University-Rosedale seat, formerly held by Chrystia Freeland, the NDP did overtake the Conservative Party and improved their vote share by 9%, they still remained a distant second by over 45% of the vote.
In April, the party won a majority after a number of defections and three by-election victories. One defection was Lori Idlout of the NDP, further reducing the party’s standing in the Commons.
Moreover, in the NDP leadership race, only one of the five candidates was an MP, and an out-of-parliament candidate would emerge victorious to lead the party. The NDP has seen a boost in popularity since the election of Avi Lewis as leader, raising a record $1.2 million in his campaign and helping the party top 100,000 members, but this has yet to have little tangible electoral translation. 338Canada polling as of May still shows the party linging below 10%. The Liberals have about 45% support while the Tories have about 35%.
The poor performance of the Conservatives since the election perhaps prove this is not a rejection of a fragmented political system but just endemic of the popularity of the Liberals under Carney. The party’s vote share dropped 11% of the vote in all three by-election seats, crashing to just 3% in Terrebonne.
As such, Canada is perhaps more of a one-and-a-half party system.
GRIFFIN KAYE.
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