Longest ballot committee planning 200-name ballot for Poilievre byelection

Article content

OTTAWA — If you thought Carleton’s election ballot was long, you haven’t seen nothing yet.

That was the message Monday from the Longest Ballot Committee, which plans to once again unleash their long-running election reform protest on the Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, where Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre hopes to win back a seat in the House of Commons — this time with a record-smashing 200-name ballot.

“2015 was supposed to be the last election by first-past-the-post, and of course that promise fell through” said committee spokesperson Donovan Eckstrom, referring to the contentious polling system that former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned to do away with.

“It gets the conversation going — people say, ‘Why is this ballot so big?’ and then they look it up and say ‘Oh, that’s interesting’ — everybody smiles, and nobody gets upset.”

Eckstrom has run in numerous elections, both as an independent as part of longest ballot and for the Rhinoceros Party.

Recommended video

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

Last week, re-elected Conservative MP Damien Kurek offered to step aside to let Poilievre run after the Tory leader lost his seat in the suburban Ottawa riding of Carleton on election night to Liberal challenger Bruce Fanjoy.

Battle River-Crowfoot is a rural riding in east-central Alberta and is among the country’s safest Conservative seats. The PMO has yet to announce a date for that byelection.

While the committee planned to also run candidates in Prime MInister’s Mark Carney’s riding, his installation as Nepean’s Liberal candidate came too late to organize a protest there.

The committee’s work in Carleton produced a nearly metre-long ballot, listing 91 candidates — matching the record-breaking ballot in the Sept. 2024 federal byelection in LaSalle—Emard—Verdun.

That topped the previous record of 84 candidates for the June 2024 byelection in Toronto-St. Paul’s.

Responding to criticism and accusations of electoral interference after the committee chose to take action in Carleton, Eckstrom noted that while most of the anger came from Conservatives, their usual critics rank among Trudeau-supporting Liberals.

“Leading up to that point, it was the Liberals who thought the long ballot was a conniving scheme lead by Pierre Poilievre and the Koch brothers to take out (newly-elected Carleton MP) Bruce Fanjoy,” he said.

Eckstrom said that he suspects if bills like C-65 — an election reform bill that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued — gets reintroduced, the protest could be legislated out of existence.

“So instead of fixing it, they’re going to make it harder for regular people to run,” he said, adding that making their campaign illegal instead of fixing a broken electoral system is peak Canada.

“It’s like if my roof has a small leak, so let’s just tear down my house to rebuild it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s government for you.”

bpassifiume@postmedia.com
X: @bryanpassifiume