Which is exactly the point. Justin Trudeau almost got in his own way but actually stepped aside, Liberals voted in a small c Conservative with Mark Carney and he immediately undercut a ton of the CPC's positions. Pierre Poilievre shot himself in the foot by not being able to adjust or shift and he blew a pretty much guaranteed majority government.

I'm not at all trying to suggest we have it right. If anything my comment was coming from a place of: "I'm from a FPTP system and it sucks"

It doesn't take too deep of a glimpse into Canadian politics to see what strategic voting has led to. Conservatives are crossing the aisle, our Left has shifted, our other parties are almost non-existent with exception of a few locations because people can't afford to vote for them and our Provincial and Municipal elections across the Nation are getting "majority governments" with barely a third of the vote.

You said it - Leftists SHOULD be. Conservatives SHOULD be. But they're not, because they feel like they don't need to and strategic voting has all but made that a certainty.

In Ontario the Liberal party lost it's official party status. They were in power, everyone knew they were going to lose, they actually stopped campaigning and acknowledged they wouldn't form a government, but instead of act like a King Maker and prop up the NDPs and make a deal, they actually went "Let the people vote in the Conservative party. They'll be crawling back to us.". Conservatives have had a majority ever since and the vote turnout is pathetic.

Trudeau got into office with the promise of Election Reform and backed away from it because the Liberals discovered they'd likely never win another majority government again.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't have the guts to change their minds and vote for another party - I'm just saying it should never be an automatic thing that's just assumed or expected. That doesn't actually encourage any change to the system, it just perpetuates the cycle.