Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet speaks in the Foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on May 15.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
The Bloc Québécois is going to court to seek a new election in a Montreal-area riding where the Liberal candidate won by one vote.
Elections Canada says the outcome – the result of a judicial recount – is final, but Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet says lawyers for the party will go to the province’s Superior Court to overturn it.
“I will not comment on the legal process per se because I am not a lawyer,” Mr. Blanchet told a news conference Thursday on Parliament Hill.
He said the party would initiate a process to ask the court to order a new election in the riding “as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Blanchet acknowledged that the case may eventually end up in the Supreme Court of Canada.
At issue is the situation in the riding of Terrebonne, where a judicial recount determined that Liberal candidate Tatiana Auguste had defeated Bloc candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné by a single vote.
Initially, on election night, Ms. Auguste appeared to be the winner by 35 votes, but the standard validation process indicated that Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné led by 44 votes. The narrow margin of victory forced the judicial recount, which resulted in Ms. Auguste’s one-vote win.
A Bloc voter in the riding has told media, including The Globe and Mail, that her mail-in ballot was returned to her on May 2, four days after the election, apparently because of an incorrect postal code on the envelope’s preprinted address.
Had her vote been counted among the more than 60,000 ballots cast, the race might have ended in a tie.
Elections Canada spokesperson Matthew McKenna said in a statement that, in the event of a tie, the Chief Electoral Officer would have informed the Speaker of the House of Commons and a new election would have been held in that riding.
Asked about the Bloc‘s legal plans, Mr. McKenna said Thursday that the results in Terrebonne have been validated and the recount is final.
However, he said, if the legal effort to contest the election is successful, the result becomes null and void and a by-election must take place.
“Elections Canada’s role is to provide courts with all necessary information in a completely neutral way,” he said.
The Liberals have 170 seats in the House of Commons – just two shy of a majority – to the Conservatives’ 143. The Bloc has 22, the NDP seven and the Green Party one.
There are three more judicial recounts scheduled, though Mr. McKenna said there is still no timeline for completing them. Such exercises occur when there is a difference of less than 0.1 per cent between the leading candidate and the second-place candidate.
There is no path for the Liberals to gain a majority government as a result of the recounts.
The returned Bloc vote isn’t the only irregularity in the Terrebonne contest – though it is the one upon which the Bloc is basing its court challenge.
Elections Canada said Thursday that five other ballots, which also contained erroneous postal codes on their return envelopes, were received at the local returning office after the deadline.
“There is no information as to whether the delay was due to the incorrect postal code. We note that voters signed the declaration late in the election period,” the agency said in a statement.
Ms. Sinclair-Desgagné, who attended the Bloc‘s news conference, said the situation has been an emotional roller coaster.
“We went from being ahead to losing by one vote,” said the former economic adviser to the City of Montreal, who was initially elected in 2021 and was seeking a second term.
“This is an issue that goes beyond party politics. It‘s an issue of trust in our democratic institutions,” she told journalists.
“It‘s important, in our case, to go right as far as we can to ensure that citizens of Terrebonne have a legitimate member of Parliament.”
Mr. Blanchet said he did not want to aggravate the unusual situation by suggesting that the electoral system should be changed.
“We’re talking about a specific case where the citizens have a right to be properly represented in a case of this irregularity, meaning a new election is necessary. That will come from an order of the court.”
The Globe reached out to the federal Liberal Party for comment on the Bloc‘s legal plans regarding Terrebonne. Liberal spokesperson Matteo Rossi responded with a statement that did not address the issue and referred specific questions to Elections Canada.
Recounts are also under way in the Toronto-area riding of Milton East-Halton Hills South, where Liberal candidate Kristina Tesser Derksen leads Conservative candidate Parm Gill by 29 votes, and in the Newfoundland and Labrador riding of Terra Nova-The Peninsulas, where Liberal Anthony Germain leads Conservative candidate Jonathan Rowe by just 12 votes.
A third, in the riding of Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore, is not scheduled to begin until next Tuesday. There, Conservative challenger Kathy Borrelli leads Liberal incumbent Irek Kusmierczyk by 77 votes.
With a report from The Canadian Press