With the deadline now passed for candidates to register for the upcoming byelection in Battle River–Crowfoot, Alta., the final tally of names that will be on the ballot clocks in at a record of more than 210.
The Aug. 18 contest to replace former Conservative MP Damien Kurek is still Tory Leader Pierre Poilievre’s to lose as the choice of an incredibly safe seat to return to the House of Commons after losing his own longtime Carleton, Ont., riding in April.
But voters will have to wade through a historically long list to find his name, or any other candidate making a legitimate run for the seat thanks to the protest effort organized by the Longest Ballot Committee in its bid to foster change to Canada’s electoral system away from the first-past-the-post status quo. It has been active in eight federal and provincial races since 2019.
There wasn’t a massive hue and cry when the group targeted Liberal-held ridings during a pair of 2024 byelections, but now that it’s picking up steam and has twice affected a race in which Poilievre is running, politicians and hopefuls are progressing past quiet grumbling into full-scale discontent.
On July 22, Poilievre and democratic reform critic Michael Cooper sent a letter to Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon to “demand action against a blatant abuse of our democratic system.”
They flagged legislative reforms they want to see introduced this fall, including a restriction for official agents to only represent one candidate at a time, and to require endorsement signatures be limited to one candidate while also raising the threshold for signatures on a candidate’s nomination to 0.5 per cent of the riding’s population.
Some of these changes are things for which Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault has been advocating for quite some time, but those suggestions have previously fallen on ears unwilling to listen.
He raised the issue again last November when the electoral reform bill C-65 was working its way through the House. That bill ultimately died on the Order Paper, having never made it out of committee.
But when legislators had the chance to truly dig in, only a couple of committee members meaningfully engaged with Perrault’s suggestions.
This has led to Perrault and Elections Canada having to take matters into their own hands. The Aug. 18 vote will feature a modified ballot where electors can simply write in the name of their preferred candidate.
“In the last four byelections, I’ve had to adapt the prescriptions of the [Elections] Act to accommodate the number of candidates. That means I’m setting aside the will of Parliament, and I do not do that lightly,” Perrault said last November.
If the Longest Ballot Committee is exposing a vulnerability in our democratic system (aside from their stated intentions of abolishing first past the post), then it’s a legitimate question to be examined. But it shouldn’t take politicians being personally inconvenienced to want to actually take real action on any issue.
The Hill Times