GUNTER: 'Attention-seeking' group stacking ballot in Alberta byelection should stop
Politicians shouldn’t be in charge of reforming process, but protesters who represent no one but themselves shouldn't either
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As of Tuesday, the Longest Ballot Committee had signed up more than 130 candidates to run in the Aug. 18 byelection in the Battle River-Crowfoot riding.
All have the same registered agent, Tomas Szuchewycz, the official spokesman for the committee. And with a week left until nominations close, there is a chance the committee will reach its goal of signing up 200 candidates.
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The rule is that each candidate must have 100 signatures from people who live in the riding, signed in front of witnesses. At the time of writing, Elections Canada had not responded to my question about whether they had verified the residence of all 130 candidates’ nominators.
This is just an attention-seeking stunt. Most of the committee’s candidates are not from the riding. I’d bet most have never been to the oil, farming and ranching riding in east-central Alberta. They might even have trouble pointing it out on a map. And most will never come — ever — not just during the campaign.
Many are people who let the committee place their names on the ballot in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton during the April general election — the riding Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre lost, necessitating this byelection.
The Longest Ballot Committee is not interested in what the voters of the riding want. They have no intent of listening to them or taking their views to Ottawa. They are in the race for one reason only, to gum up the works to draw attention to their demand that Canada jettison its first-past-the-post electoral system in favour of proportional representation.
The irony is that their stated goal is to improve Canadian democracy. Politicians shouldn’t be in charge of reforming the process. But they, who have never been elected to anything, who represent no one but themselves, believe they should decide.
Want the system changed with legitimacy, folks? Dedicate yourself to the hard work of getting elected, then going to Ottawa and convincing the other MPs to vote for change, too.
The other irony? The committee focused its attack in the April election on Poilievre. They didn’t also clog the ballot in Mark Carney’s riding even though it was the Liberals who promised never to run another election on first-past-the-post after their 2015 election victory, then reneged.
Don’t you think if a group’s aim is to highlight politicians’ inherent conflict-of-interest in bringing in election changes, they’d focus their efforts on the party that promised but didn’t deliver?
Instead the committee is going after Poilievre a second time in under four months. That couldn’t be a show of ideological bias, could it?
The committee is at one and the same time arrogant and sophomoric. In their, “Look at us! Look at us!” trickery, they are making it harder for voters who actually live in Battle River-Crowfoot (or any other riding they target) to cast a ballot for the person they believe will best represent their riding in Parliament.
I’m not against electoral protests. Spoil your ballot, if you believe the exercise is futile.
And I have more than once defended in print Edmonton’s Eat Your Ballot committee. In the past, they have gone to their polling stations on election day, picked up their ballots, taken them outside to eat it in front of media cameras. I’ve seen them blend their ballots with juice on the polling station steps and drink them.
One Edmonton protester even boiled hers in chocolate, poured it in a tart shell and ate it.
The ballot-eaters had much the same electoral goals as the Longest Ballot Committee, but the difference is they were affecting only their own ballots. The ballot belongs to the voter, who should be free to do with it as he or she wishes.
But the committee is making it harder for others to exercise their democratic rights. They should grow up and stop.
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