Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, today I would like to address very briefly two topics and then dwell at greater length on a third. Like many of my colleagues here, I am generally supportive of this legislation. I do think it is good that it will go to committee where it will, one hopes, be open for genuine good-faith amendments to improve it. Since we agree on the substance of the bill, it should be easy for us to find improvements that make sense to all of us. I am very hopeful that will happen. There are three areas that deserve being noted because they are particularly valuable. One is the banning of anonymous contributions through cryptocurrency, which I think removes a loophole on the idea we have had established in Canadian electoral legislation for some time, that we ought to be able to identify all contributors and that all contributions are public contributions. It is also a way of getting around potentially maximum contribution levels for individuals. Dealing with that is useful. The removal of some forms of foreign interference is also beneficial. Then, of course, there is the issue of ballot integrity, which is dealing with the problems introduced by the activities of the longest ballot committee. I want to spend a bit of time talking about that. I had the chance to see this up close in the last federal election, about this time last year, when I spent a considerable amount of time campaigning in the riding of Carleton, where the leader of my party was running. It is the riding that joins my own riding. It was clear that there was a need to get in there and do what we could to help the leader. Ultimately, the efforts that other individuals and I made were insufficient, although we did cause him to experience the highest Conservative vote he had ever had in his entire career, but that was insufficient to win the riding. At the same time that was going on, there was an effort by the longest ballot committee to put many people onto the ballot, ostensibly, in the service of their goal of trying to draw attention to the abandonment, way back in 2017 ,of Justin Trudeau's stated goal of changing the electoral system. We will recall that in 2015, then candidate Trudeau said this would be the last election under first past the post. There was then a series of hearings of a parliamentary committee for this purpose. I served on that committee, and so did my colleague who is nodding. She still looks somewhat exhausted from the experience. We came up with a proposal that, ultimately, he decided was not very satisfactory, so Trudeau stepped away from it. The longest ballot committee felt this would be a way of drawing attention to their concerns with his abandonment and his approach. I think that may be how it started, but as time went on, it went from being a form of political protest to being a kind of performance art. There is nothing wrong, I suppose, with engaging in performance art if it creates no harm, but I think in this case it did create harm. I will, first of all, show how over a period of time, over six different elections, this transformation occurred. In the year 2021, in the riding of St. Boniface—St. Vital, the longest ballot committee put forward 15 candidates. Of those 15 candidates, the maximum number of votes garnered for one candidate was 58 votes. The minimum number received by a longest ballot committee candidate was seven votes. In 2022, there was a by-election in Mississauga—Lakeshore. This time, there were 33 candidates from the longest ballot committee, more than double. The maximum number of votes received by any of them was 48. The third by-election took place in Winnipeg South Centre. It resulted in 42 candidates that time, so it is going up, as we will notice. There was a maximum number of 36 votes for any of those candidates and there was a candidate who received only one vote. The fourth time this happened, when the longest ballot committee weighed in, was in a by-election in 2024 in Toronto—St. Paul's. This time, there were 77 longest ballot committee candidates. For the first time, we saw a candidate who received zero votes, strongly suggesting that the candidate was not a resident of the riding and was not even able to vote for himself or herself. The fifth time this came up was in a by-election in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun in September 2024, with 77 longest ballot candidates again. By the way, I got all this information from Wikipedia. In each of these, as I looked it up, it said that it was a new record-breaking result. It seems that whoever wrote those articles was starting to cover it as a kind of sporting event. There were 77 candidates for the committee. The maximum number of votes achieved was 34, so we notice a gradual downward trend here. Two candidates got zero votes. The next one was in Carleton last year, with 85 candidates, a significant number of whom received zero votes. Finally, last August, in Battle River—Crowfoot, we saw something in the neighbourhood of 200 candidates for the longest ballot committee. The point is that 77 of those candidates got zero votes, and a significant number got one vote each. That was the performance chart. Now, what are the consequences of doing this? In Battle River—Crowfoot, there were two independent candidates, both of whom complained that they had a hard time being taken seriously and drawing independent attention to local issues, which is often what independent candidates are trying to do, because they were being conflated with the people on the longest ballot committee. In fact, the second-place candidate in that by-election was an independent candidate, Bonnie Critchley, and she largely got attention for the issues she was concerned about by criticizing the longest ballot committee and asking, “How can we express our concerns when these guys are hogging all the bandwidth and distracting?” As I said, she came in second. In all fairness, she got only 9.8% of the vote, but that was more than twice what the Liberal candidate got. She was a serious candidate. These other people were not serious candidates. I think that's a legitimate harm they are doing. Perhaps it is not a harm that is a cause to ban them. However, I will point out as well that my step-mother lives in the riding of Carleton. She is quite elderly now and cannot get out to vote, so I looked into getting a ballot for her to participate from home. In these circumstances, it is very difficult to get a mail-in ballot that would be usable by someone in her situation. Likewise, someone who is visually impaired is normally enabled to vote and to participate fully, with a confidential, secret ballot, when there is a normal-length ballot, in the following manner: People are given a ballot and then a template with a series of holes. They can feel which hole is in which spot, while the names of the candidates are read out to them in order, typically in alphabetical order. They identify that they will vote for candidate number three, who is the candidate of their party. They go behind the screen, count down to the third spot and mark their X. It gets put into the ballot box with everybody else's ballot. The result is that they have a secret ballot. Once this is done, that is taken away from them. Taking away the right of a citizen to participate fully and properly in an election is, in my view, a contravention of section 3 of the charter, which guarantees every Canadian the right to vote in a federal election. I am sure that was not the intention, but that is the practical result. The practical proposal being adopted in this legislation is one that eliminates the ability to engage in this kind of frivolous balloting. It is not that independent candidates cannot get on the ballot, real independent candidates like Bonnie Critchley. It is a way of ensuring that candidates who have taken what started off as a legitimate protest and turned it into a form of performance art cannot engage in that performance art at the expense of the constitutional rights of Canadians who have disabilities, who are prohibited by their actions from participating in a full, proper and rights-respecting manner.
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