Trudeau wanted ranked ballots. Would that have changed Monday's results?

Looking back on his time as prime minister, Justin Trudeau said that abandoning his promise of electoral reform was his biggest regret.

"Particularly as we approach this election … I do wish that we'd been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country, so that people could choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot," Trudeau said after announcing his resignation in January, seeming to support a ranked ballot that would let voters pick their preferred candidates in numerical order.

"Parties would spend more time trying to be people's second or third choices, and people would be looking for things they have in common, rather than trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other."

In such a system, also called "alternative vote," if one person didn't get a clear majority on the first count, second-choice votes would be counted until someone got more than 50 per cent support.

CBC News posed the question to political experts: What would Monday's election have looked like under a ranked ballot system? 

Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at York University in Toronto who studies electoral reform, says the results would not have been as devastating for the smaller parties, particularly the NDP, who were clobbered by strategic voting efforts.

Pilon uses the B.C. riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith as an example: NDP incumbent Lisa Marie Barron fell to Conservative Tamara Kronis, who had just 35.2 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Liberals, NDP and Greens combined for 64.4 per cent. 

"The reason that we saw such a decline for both the Greens and the NDP has less to do with public judgments about their efficacy or desirability as parties, and everything to do with the kind of straitjacket that people felt they were put into, in terms of the strategic [voting] dilemma that they faced," Pilon said. 

He says that's why in cases like Nanaimo–Ladysmith, supporters of NDP incumbents likely felt they had to "hold their nose" and vote Liberal to hold off the Conservatives.

Such voting strategies set off heated debates among some progressives in the lead-up to the election. As results rolled in Monday night, some voters posted on social media that they wished they had a ranked ballot system. 

"What makes it so difficult is that voters lack the information to be able to make that strategic vote effectively, because to be really strategic, you've got to have a good sense of what everyone else is going to do — and that's the very thing you can't get," Pilon said. "It's very unlikely to get good polling information about an individual constituency."

The NDP lost most of its seats after Monday's vote, falling from 24 to seven and losing official party status.

Pilon says the ranked ballot system still tends to funnel support back to the biggest parties, which is why voting reform advocates generally prefer proportional representation, which would base a party's number of seats in Parliament on its percentage of the popular vote. 

But Pilon says Liberals in particular would benefit from ranked ballots because they would likely have more people willing to rate them in second place, whereas the Conservatives have fewer "adjacent parties" to draw from — though he notes some Conservative gains in Monday's election may have come at the expense of the People's Party of Canada.