When Toronto-St. Paul voters head to the polls later this month, they may wish they had a search function on their ballot.
A record 84 candidates ran in the by-election on June 24, making it the longest-running election in federal election history.
Dozens of independent candidates have entered the race as part of an organized protest against Canada’s single-member district system.
“We need to highlight the fact that our voting system is a joke and produces completely inaccurate and skewed results,” said Glenn MacDonald, a candidate in the Toronto-St. Paul constituency and the longest-serving voting committee volunteer.
MacDonald pointed to the last two elections in which the Liberal Party won despite losing the popular vote.
The longest-running voting committee has encouraged candidates to run in protest in two by-elections, in Mississauga-Lakeshore, Ont., in 2022 and in Winnipeg-South Centre last year, which had the highest number of candidates to date. In Toronto-St. Paul, the committee has nearly doubled the number of candidates, from 40 and 48 in the past two elections, respectively.
Julie Saint-Amand, who ran in all three by-elections, said past advocacy efforts had been ineffective and hoped the large number of candidates would draw attention to the debate over electoral reform.
“Hopefully, once more people know about it and start talking about it, it will spread like wildfire,” she said.
Elections Canada had to make some temporary changes to the Elections Act to accommodate the oversized ballots. (The Act requires the head of Elections Canada to: Making short-term changes In the event of an “emergency, unusual or unexpected situation.”
The ballot will have two columns of candidates instead of the traditional single column, and will have circles on the left and right margins of the ballot for voters to indicate their preference. (Electoral law requires that the circles must always be to the right of the candidate’s name.)
According to Elections Canada, ballots are 30 centimetres wide and 90 centimetres long.
A typical ballot box can hold 1,000 ballots. Elections Canada expects each box to hold just 100 on election night in Toronto-St. Paul.
Trudeau promised electoral reform in 2015.
Under Canada’s current voting system, a candidate can win a constituency simply by receiving the most votes, even if he or she does not receive 50 percent of the support.
Both Saint-Amand and MacDonald said they would like to see some sort of proportional electoral system in which seats in the House of Commons reflect parties’ national vote shares.
During his first campaign as Liberal leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that the 2015 election would be the last one to be held under single-member district system.
But once in power, Trudeau and the Liberal Party Gradually backed away from that promise.
Mr McDonald said he was “appalled” by the decision.
“This incident has further heightened the skepticism that many people have about politics and voting, where politicians promise things and then as soon as they take office decide, ‘actually, I didn’t say that,'” he said.
But MacDonald pointed out that the Liberal Party is not alone in abandoning the idea of electoral reform.
“This is an issue that both sides of the political spectrum struggle with,” he said.
The NDP has long advocated for electoral reform, but its provincial governments have not changed the voting systems in their jurisdictions.
Even Conservative Stephen Harper considered the idea of electoral reform before he became prime minister.
in A 13-page paper co-authored in 1997Harper blamed the split in the conservative vote between the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party for keeping the Liberal government in power at the time.
“The two parties could start by agreeing to advocate for an electoral system with runoff elections, preferential voting or a mixed proportional representation system, which would be in both parties’ interests,” Harper and co-author Tom Flanagan wrote.
But when Harper became leader of the modern Conservative Party, a merger of two parties that had previously advocated for electoral reform, and eventually came to power, he did not push for a new voting system.
“If you’ve won once under single-member districts, why do you want to get rid of it and risk never being able to win again under any system?” Saint-Amand said.
Her comments echo a passage from Harper and Flangan’s 1997 paper.
“Implementing electoral reform is rarely in the ruling party’s short-term interest; by definition, the system works perfectly for the incumbent, and changing it is likely to benefit its opponents next time around,” they wrote.
MacDonald said he hopes the large turnout at Toronto St. Paul’s draws attention to his concerns about the current voting system, and he said he’s open to putting his name on the ballot again.
“If we decide to hold such a longest poll again, I would definitely run and I would support any proposals that raise the issue of electoral reform,” he said.
