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Canada has a similar system (whichever candidate recieves a plurality of the votes wins the seat in the region) and has 5 different parties in their government.
Westminster-style parliament is far less "winner takes all" than the US system though. We don't even really have an executive branch in the sense that the US does, and we have many more levers that can be pulled to topple an abusive government - including by royal decree.
In the US, if an official needs to be removed, they have to be impeached and convicted by their peers, after which they are removed and depending on what their position/home state/etc, they may leave a vacant seat or have a replacement appointed until the next elected. However in the case of the president, there is a clear line of succession, and it it virtually guaranteed that everyone in that line is ideologically aligned.
In Canada, there is a recall process that is initiated by the voters as a petition, put to a vote by the people, and if successful, that person is immediately removed and a by-election is called.
In the US, if the government can't pass a budget, it shits itself and shuts down. In Canada, if the government can't pass a budget, parliament is dissolved and there's a new election - but everything else just keeps running based on the last successful budget.
Sounds like the US has a shitty system and they should improve it. None of that is relevant to actually developing a third party however. There is 1 single president but (theoretically) needs support of the House and Senate. Recalls and budgets are irrelevant to the issue of only having 2 parties.
No, I was not encouraging people in the US to vote 3rd party in the last election. But now is an excellent time to start working on some 3rd party candidates for 2028.
It is a shitty system but fixing it is even harder because Constitutional amendments need 38/50 states to agree.
Officially we're down to three, and the trend over the last decade is not promising:
collapsed inline media
And our Prime Minister does not have royal powers like the US president. Pardons are rare.
Very true, but not relevant to the 'third parties are impossible' argument.
A Parliamentary system is pretty different from a Presidential one and we also don't have a way to call a vote of no-confidence or otherwise change the government outside of the rigid election cycle, and Canada only really has two parties at the Federal level.
The current as well as the past several elections have resulted in minority governments: The party with the most seats does not have enough votes on their own to pass legislation. They need a 3rd party to vote with them in order to get anything passed. The NDP has also been the official opposition in the past.
There's some movement in cities like New York and Seattle to elect 3rd parties to major positions but the problem isn't really in urban areas. The Republican party is almost as much a religious sect as it is a political group and undoing the Christian Supremacy they've attached to is the kind of change that takes generations of education.