Three of the four main parties in Ontario promise to change the province's electoral system, a goal one political science expert says may not be achieved.

The New Democratic Party and the Greens prefer forms of proportional representation, while Liberal leader Steven Del Duca pledges to step down if his party forms the government.

Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford has remained silent on this issue, although he indicated that he is not inclined to reform the electoral system.

Del Duca said during his campaign in Thunder Bay on Sunday: "Doug Ford may want us to be stuck and trying to drag people backward, but we want to make sure our political system—our democracy, and how we choose our parties and leaders—is keeping up with the times."

But Kristen De Clercy, associate professor of political science at Western University, said that while electoral reform is a common topic on the campaign trail, it is easier to talk about change than to actually implement it.

She said: "If we look at the history of electoral reform over the past twenty years in Canada at the provincial level, the evidence is not positive for the likelihood of achieving electoral reform even within the next twenty years."

British Columbia held several referendums on this issue, but De Clercy pointed out that proposals for change did not bear fruit.

Ford's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on electoral reform, but De Clercy said there are good reasons to stick with the first-past-the-post system. She said, "Ontario has a competitive multi-party system." "If we introduce electoral reform, it is unlikely we will have any majority government. So we will always be in a minority government situation, which is inherently unstable as coalitions can collapse and we return to the polls."

She said it also makes sense that Ford would hesitate to reform the electoral system given the nature of his party.

She noted that "the Conservatives tend ideologically to be the traditional party in Canadian politics."

The other three parties said the current system is not working well.

The New Democratic Party, led by Andrea Horwath, supports a mixed proportional voting system, which tries to add some stability to the first-past-the-post system and leads to a fully proportional government.

Under the system proposed by the New Democratic Party, some legislators would be elected in local districts and others for the entire province from party lists.

The system was designed by the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, which was established by a previous Liberal government in 2006.

Horwath said on Saturday, "The people of Ontario really recommended the mixed proportional system, that's why we adopted it."

But when the proposal was put to referendum in the 2007 election, the province voted against it.

Meanwhile, the Green Party prefers a fully proportional system but suggests in its program creating a "diverse and randomly selected" citizen group to make binding recommendations.

Edited by: Dima Abu Khair