Welcome to the Two-And-A-Half-Party System.
Three parties in Québec, two parties everywhere else.
The 2025 Canadian Federal Election is done, and the results are in. The Liberals will hold on to a minority government. The Liberals and the Conservatives have both increased their popular vote share and seat counts, going to 168 seats and 144 seats respectively.
The Bloc Québécois, in third place, dropped from 33 seats pre-dissolution to 23 seats, but remained well above the threshold for party status. And indeed, they are the only crossbench party to retain official party status.
The NDP caucus was decimated, plummeting from 24 seats pre-dissolution down to only 7 seats, losing party status, something that will massively hamper their ability to organize going forward.
For those unaware, “party status” is a threshold of seats, currently just 12, at which a political party is entitled to dedicated speaking time on the order paper, as well as dedicated caucus funding separate from individual MPs office budgets.
In practice, this means the NDP will be far less visible in Parliament, and that they will be much more restricted in terms of financial resources available for research and self-promotion.
Considering that the Bloc only run in Québec, and thus won 23 of the 78 seats they contested, they were fairly resilient. Both the Bloc and the NDP got 6.3% of the popular vote “nationwide”, but the Bloc got all those votes in just one province.
So Canada hasn’t fully degenerated into a two-party system…as long as you live in Québec.
The Greens have never come high enough to meet party status, but they have suffered severely in the 2025 results. In 2019, they reached a peak of 3 seats, only to fracture their environment-focused caucus over Israel-Palestine of all issues, triggering a floor-crossing to the Liberals.
In 2021, they managed to keep two seats, but in this election they have been reduced back to Elizabeth May alone. The Green Party no longer represents multiple provinces. The co-leader, Jonathan Pedneault, has resigned after placing fifth place in Outremont against the Liberal incumbent.
While Jagmeet Singh lost his seat, and resigned as a result, at least the NDP still have a federal brand beyond him, and the capacity to elect people other than him. The Greens have a much worse problem. After two attempts, they are fully unable to move on from Elizabeth May.
My jokes in the past about the “Elizabeth May Personality Cult” suddenly don’t feel like jokes anymore. And yes, of course all political leaders try to cultivate good PR, but a political party still needs an identity beyond that of a single human being, because eventually circumstances beyond your control will take that leader away from you.
Both the NDP and the Greens are in an existential crisis, for different reasons. But having failed to impose electoral reform, the truth is that they will suffer heavily under First-Past-The-Post.
I’m not writing any death warrants yet; anything is possible. The Green and NDP brands have some positive reputation from provincial parties, that are quite frankly far more competent at the whole “getting elected” thing. But those parties also compete in degenerated FPTP systems, where it is the Liberals who have been decimated.
Pierre Poilievre has not resigned, and as much as I loathe him, he is strategically correct to do so. He will find a safe Conservative seat in Alberta and “convince” one of the many MPs just elected there to step down so he can run. If he can maintain enough support in his party, then he can survive.
But he will have a problem getting that to happen quickly. According to the Parliament of Canada Act, an MP may not resign until the window for contesting the election results has expired. This thirty-day window begins the day that the validated results for the riding in question are published in the Canada Gazette, something that has not yet occurred.
Furthermore, once there is a vacancy, the Prime Minister (in this case Liberal Mark Carney) can wait one-hundred-and-eighty days before the date of dropping the writ. Then, the length of the election can be a maximum of fifty days from that of the writ drop.
What does this mean? Mark Carney could hypothetically keep Pierre Poilievre out of the House of Commons for a maximum of 260 days, a clock which has not yet started because the Canada Gazette has not published the results, and also a clock which ignores the delay from winning the election to being sworn-in.
Charitably? Pierre Poilievre could be kept out of a seat in the House of Commons until 2026. And if Conservatives don’t want to suffer through that, they will likely try and remove him in the leadership review. But Conservatives will survive as a strong opposition force, regardless of whether he stays as their leader.
Prime Minister Carney will step into the House of Commons with a strong minority government, knowing the NDP do not have the financial resources to run another election for a while. Any bluff they make about withholding support during a confidence vote will not be a credible one.
He will be able to play the NDP and the Bloc off each other, going vote-by-vote rather than signing a long-term agreement. The Liberals only need one of those two to support them in the House, which means neither have a particularly strong bargaining position.
In short? Outside of Québec, Canada has effectively degenerated into a two-party system, with progressives largely aligning behind the Liberal Party despite Carney’s rightward shift from Trudeau. The crossbench has dramatically shrunk, and it is the Greens and the NDP whom are most severely affected.
But inside Québec, the Bloc survives, because they have carved out a purpose and identity as a regionalist party, and thus doesn’t compete on the left/right spectrum as the other crossbench parties do.
If there’s a lesson here? Absent electoral reform, the only strategy that can successfully scale is regionalism. And with musings about Albertan separatism?
Well, I wouldn’t be shocked to see an “Alliance” start rumbling about “Reform”.
Good summation. The Greens (and the People's Party) are also in trouble for the fact that they have newly lost the 60% campaign reimbursement that parties with 2% or more of the vote receive. They do not qualify for that this time around, so money will be even tighter for them going forward.
Absolutely spot on about electoral reform. Great piece.