A Conservative supporter watches a screen displaying voting results and the Stanley Cup final at an election night event for Toronto-St.Paul's candidate Don Stewart in Toronto on June 24.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Canada’s elections agency is defending the way it handled the counting of votes in this week’s Toronto-St. Paul’s federal by-election, where the results, which saw the Liberals lose a seat they had held since 1993, were not known until the morning after the vote.
Elections Canada attributed the delay with counting Monday’s ballots to a large number of candidates, amounting to 84 names – many of them volunteers rallied by activists in a bid to call attention to the need for electoral reform.
“The unusual dimensions of the ballot itself meant that some steps took more time than normal,” Elections Canada spokesperson Matthew McKnight said in a statement on Tuesday.
Seventy-seven volunteers, recruited by a group called the Longest Ballot Committee, submitted their names as candidates for the election, according to spokesperson Sébastien CoRhino, also a leader of the satirical Rhinoceros Party. That led to complications counting the ballots, Mr. McKnight said.
“Generally speaking, delays compounded across several steps over the course of the night,” he said.
For example, he said unfolding each ballot took longer and there were more ballot boxes overall, so reporting vote totals required additional time.
“As always, the counting and reporting process was done by hand, in front of candidates’ representatives – the count continued into the night until all results were published online.”
The results saw Conservative candidate Don Stewart secure a narrow win over Liberal Leslie Church, a former chief of staff to Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.
In an interview, Mr. CoRhino said the cluster of volunteers were aimed at highlighting the point that the Liberals and Conservatives dominate Canadian politics, and that, though other parties get support, they do not get seats that reflect their total number of votes.
In the 2015 election that saw Justin Trudeau lead his Liberals to a majority government, he promised an electoral reform agenda. The commitment meant that the 2015 vote would have been the last with a first-past-the-point system, in which the candidate with the largest number of votes – even if they do not receive a majority – wins the seat.
However, the Prime Minister later backed away from the promise, deeming it unworkable. Mr. CoRhino said he was angered by Mr. Trudeau’s reversal and is now involved with the Longest Ballot Committee as a spokesperson.
He said he regretted the “collateral impact” of their activism that forced voters to wait longer than usual to vote and also imposed challenges on Elections Canada workers. He was on the ballot himself and got eight votes.
“My goal was not to harm anybody but was to show Canadians what could be a different voting system,” he said.
He said he does not know if the Longest Ballot Committee, which consists of between five and 10 volunteers across Canada, wants to do another protest in the next general election, expected in the fall of 2025.
The group has previously added names to ballots in some ridings in the 2021 election and other votes since then.
Mr. Stewart, a marketing and finance professional, won by 590 votes over Ms. Church. NDP candidate Amrit Parhar came third. Mr. Stewart had 42.1 per cent of the vote; Ms. Church, 40.5 per cent; Ms. Parhar, 10.9 per cent. Turnout was 44 per cent.
Overall, the volunteer candidates secured about 1,000 votes.
In the past Toronto-St. Paul’s election in 2021, then-Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett had a 24 percentage-point margin over the Conservatives, who came second. Ms. Bennett first became the riding’s MP in 1997 and resigned her seat in January to become Canada’s ambassador to Denmark.
Mr. McKnight said in his statement that Elections Canada will take the time to evaluate the operation of the by-election and share their assessment in a report as is done with all elections they are involved in.