OPINION: No, The Longest Ballot Committee is Doing Nothing Wrong

(Image courtesy of CBC)

Last week, the Longest Ballot Committee (LBC), a protest group that aims to reform Canada’s voting system, said that they will try to get at least 200 candidates listed in the upcoming byelection in the Alberta riding of Battle River-Crowfoot. This is the result of former MP Damien Kurek vacating his seat so Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre could run and take a seat in the House of Commons following his loss in the riding of Carleton, where he was previously elected seven times. Prime Minister Mark Carney said that he’ll schedule the election as soon as possible and that “no games” will be played.

With the announcement of the LBC’s plans, many pro-Conservative pundits and supporters have criticized the committee’s work, with one arguing that they should be investigated, and another saying that they are trying to “sabotage” Poilievre’s byelection campaign. These claims, in my view, are silly.

For starters, the LBC targeted five other federal ridings before the one in Carleton. All five were previously held Liberal seats, with three staying red, one flipping blue, and another going to the Bloc. If that’s the partisan game we’re playing, the LBC could be seen as a Conservative-leaning organization.

The group says they do what they do because they want to change Canada’s voting system away from first-past-the-post. Regardless of how you feel about their intentions, to claim that they are partisan actors trying to derail a political party is simply untrue when that is not their stated goal.

Some have even gone as far as saying this is some foreign plot to meddle in Canadian elections and make our democracy unstable. First, if the best a hostile power like China can do to meddle in Canadian elections is make the ballots in one riding very long but leave the other 342 normal, I think we are mostly okay from a national security standpoint. But we all know that China tries to meddle by more covert means. Second, even if this is some foreign plot, so what? Just change the law, make it harder for groups to do things like this.

At the end of the day, this is the crux of my point: who cares? If you want to vote for Pierre Poilievre or a Liberal or a New Democrat or whomever, you will do so when you go to vote. You will check to ensure that the “X” you mark on the ballot is right next to the candidate you support. I don’t believe that Canadians are so stupid as to vote for a random independent candidate when they go to vote. I don’t believe that after taking considerable time driving out to the polling place and waiting in line, they are just going to say “screw it” and vote for a random candidate. If Poilievre somehow loses the byelection, in a riding that voted for the Conservative over the Liberal by 70 points, he has bigger issues than the LBC.

This brings me to the argument that Poilievre lost his riding in Carleton because of the LBC. No, he didn’t. The reason he lost is simple: he fell out of favour with his constituents. Over 50 percent of Carleton voters cast their ballot for Liberal Bruce Fanjoy. Even if we gave the rest of the voters, Greens and New Democrats included, to Poilievre, he still would have lost. Voters in the area said the reason they backed Fanjoy over Poilievre was due to his stance on public servants and the 2022 Trucker Convoy. This is not to say that his policy proposals are unpopular nationally; he got 41.3 percent of the vote, the highest vote percentage for a Conservative since 1988. He is striking a chord with a large portion of Canadians, it's just that not enough of those Canadians live in the riding of Carleton.

There is also the point that, somehow, nefarious forces on the electoral boundaries commission redrew Carleton so that Poilievre could lose his seat. That is not the case. If we redistribute results from the 2021 Canadian election onto Carleton’s current riding map, it makes the riding more Conservative, not less. If these forces are so powerful as to redraw Carleton, why not redraw at least ten more Conservative ridings so that Mark Carney and the Liberals could enjoy a stable, majority government as opposed to the minority one we have currently?

At the end of the day, the LBC is taking advantage of our current electoral rules and regulations. If politicians find their tactics inconvenient, they should just change the law to make it harder on the LBC. And if Pierre Poilievre wanted to be saved from the LBC’s antics, he should’ve just won his riding like most party leaders do.