It keeps happening: Once again, in one of the world's oldest democracies, the candidate whose party got the most votes will not be awarded the most powerful office.
This puzzling outcome, the product of an arcane political system in which small jurisdictions also enjoy a disproportionate share of seats in the federal legislature, occurred for the second election in a row on Monday.
This is not to suggest there was anything illegitimate about Trudeau's victory, much less Canadian democracy; O'Toole and all the other candidates agreed to play by the rules and accepted the outcome.
The point is to provide some perspective on the debate in the United States over such institutions as legislative redistricting, the Senate and the electoral college. Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow once won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating, mathematically, that there is no such thing as a perfectly fair and representative voting system.
Published in 1951, Arrow's "impossibility theorem," as it's known, turned 70 this year; you might say Canada celebrated by confirming it.
Each of Canada's 338 legislative districts, called—picturesquely— "ridings," elects a member of the House of Commons under "first past the post" rules. Given the country's multiple parties, winners can, and often do, finish first with less than 50 percent per riding.
Trudeau will be prime minister, again, because his 32.3 percent was distributed such that Liberals won (or lead) in 158 ridings. This number of seats is fewer than the minimum needed for an absolute majority—170—but 39 more than the Conservatives won (or lead).
Getting the most seats entitles Trudeau to form a minority government, appointing ministers and making laws with the acquiescence of smaller parties. For Trudeau, the disadvantage, relative to being prime minister in a majority government, is that he must negotiate on particular bills and may be more vulnerable to a vote of no confidence.
Trudeau, having been elected as a majority prime minister in 2015 and reelected as a minority prime minister in 2019, called the snap election a month ago, when his approval rating was strong and the time was ripe to recover the majority—or so he thought.
Retaining their incumbent prime minister, while denying him any more support than he got the last time they voted, just 23 months ago, may have been the Canadian electorate's polite way of telling Trudeau this election was not the best use of their time in the middle of a pandemic. Indeed, the Liberal vote was down about a percentage point since 2019, when Trudeau's party lagged the Conservatives by 1.3 percentage points.
Comparing a parliamentary system such as Canada's with a presidential one such as ours is inherently an apples-to-oranges exercise. On the whole, Trudeau's left-of-center minority government represents the Canadian mainstream: More than 52 percent of voters backed either the Liberals or two parties to their left, the New Democrats (17.7 percent) and the Greens (2.3).
Nevertheless, in strict terms of partisan proportional representation—the criterion applied by many critics of American gerrymandering—Canada's system is hardly ideal.
Nonpartisan commissions delineate Canada's ridings, per the decennial census. Yet no province can have fewer seats in the House than it had in 1985 or than it has in Canada's Senate, a 105-member appointed body less powerful than the House. Senate seats, in turn, are distributed according to a formula: Ontario and Quebec get 24 each, other provinces, between four and 10, and one each to the three territories.
It's complicated! The upshot is that New Brunswick, with 2 percent of Canada's population, gets 9.5 percent of the Senate and 3 percent of the Commons. Lightly populated Manitoba and Saskatchewan are similarly slightly overrepresented.
Such deviations from pure proportionality are modest next to, say, the fact that Wyoming and California each have two senators.
Still, Monday's vote produced interesting discrepancies. The Bloc Quebecois received only 7.8 percent of the national vote. Concentrated in the country's French-speaking, and second-most populous, province, this share translated into 34 seats, or 10 percent of the total.
Meanwhile, the People's Party of Canada, a Trump-like offshoot of the Conservatives, got a widely scattered 5.1 percent—and zero seats. To be sure, that may be a feature: The system marginalizes extremists.
Electoral reform is a non-trivial issue in Canada, with critics noting that the country's "Gallagher Index," a statistical measure of proportional partisan representation in national legislatures, has been poor in recent years.
It's probably just a coincidence that the old rules have made him a winner three times in a row.