Conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre speaks as Green Party candidate Ashley MacDonald, left, and Liberal candidate Darcy Spady, right, listen during the Battle River-Crowfoot by-election forum in Camrose, on Tuesday.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
Once upon a time, the Longest Ballot Committee was in league with the Rhinoceros Party, putting forward a 2019 campaign to get into the Guinness Book of World Record for the longest ballot ever.
Fat chance. The Guinness Book lists the record at 1,187 candidates who ran in the Prague municipal elections in 1994. The 2019 Longest Ballot Committee effort got caught in rules and didn’t get very far, anyway.
And the current campaign – which has placed more than 200 candidates on the ballot for the Aug. 18 by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot, where Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is seeking to return to the Commons – hasn’t even come close to the record.
And now it seems that the Longest Ballot Committee folks are no longer affiliated with the Rhinos, who were once the merry pranksters of Canadian politics – running on platforms that previously included a pledge to repeal the law of gravity.
Now they are apparently the vanguard of Canada’s most humourless political movement: electoral-reform activists.
Maybe. Sometimes it looks like the whole campaign is a send-up of the electoral-reform advocates who can’t believe that anyone would disagree. And what better parody than a campaign to gum up the workings of elections until everyone changes their mind about how they should work?
At any rate, if there was any of the old Rhino spirit left among the long-ballot campaigners, they’d be laughing their heads off right now. They got Elections Canada officials to prank themselves.
The organization, which prides itself on running smooth votes at thousands of polling stations across 343 ridings, has for some reason thrown up their hands at the impossibility of printing a by-election ballot with 214 names on it.
There have been long ballots in recent elections – as many as 91 candidates. But apparently a list of more than 200 has blown up Canada’s election machine in the way that feeding an unresolvable contradiction to a misanthropic 1960s robot would cause its head to explode.
So Elections Canada will replace the usual ballot, where voters choose a candidate from a list, with an “adapted ballot,” which is elections lingo for a blank space where one writes a name.
Take that, ballot-wreckers! All we had to do was trash the way Canadians vote to foil your plot.
Of course, a ballot with 214 candidates does cause inconvenience and delays in counting. Mr. Poilievre called it a “scam.” Op-ed writers have declared it a threat to democracy. But for this one by-election, Elections Canada should have kept calm and carried on.
The same Longest Ballot Committee folks have organized such efforts before. One person, Tomas Szuchewycz, is the official agent for 201 of the 214 candidates for the Battle River-Crowfoot. Stopping him would only take a one-line amendment to elections law barring anyone from serving as the agent for more than one candidate.
In the meantime, the Longest Ballot Committee has mounted an enterprise that has skewered everyone, especially the electoral-reform movement they claim to support.
For starters, they’ve brought to life one of the weaker, but oft-repeated criticisms of proportional representation: that it would lead to long ballots full of small-party candidates in a fragmented political system. Voters taking a casual glance at the ballot in Battle River-Crowfoot can now recoil at the horror.
But it is the manner of the protest, gumming up the current election process until the one they prefer is adopted – out of a deep concern for democracy, of course – that just has to be satire.
Organizers such as Mr. Szuchewycz say that what they want is for politicians to recuse themselves from making decisions about elections laws because they are in a conflict of interest. Until they do so, apparently, the Longest Ballot Committee will troll by-elections with long lists of fake candidates.
Surely, that’s got to be a spoof on the electoral-reform advocates who are apparently certain that no right-thinking person could possibly disagree, and that if it wasn’t for the perfidy of politicians, billions of people across the Esperanto-speaking world would have chosen proportional representation long ago. If it isn’t, the joke’s on them.
Still, they’ve got to be laughing. All they had to do to make Elections Canada scrap the way we usually vote was come up with a list of names.