Activists load up ballot to push for election reform

OTTAWA • Activists hoping to disrupt a Toronto-area byelection Monday to protest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's broken promises on electoral reform have loaded up the ballot with 40 candidates, making problems for the Liberals as they try to win their first test with voters since last year's election.

The candidates are in the running to replace outgoing Liberal Mississauga-lakeshore MP Sven Spengemann, who earlier this year retired from federal politics to take a job with the United Nations.

Peter Graefe, associate professor of political science for Mcmaster University, told the National Post he doesn't share in popular narratives painting Monday's byelection as a potent litmus test on either the government or opposition.

“In the grand scene of things, it's really meaningless,” he said.

“We're three years away from the next election in terms of fixed election dates — two years if we go by the timing of the Ndp/liberal accord.”

He said what will most likely be a low-turnout byelection in the heartland of Liberal Toronto-area support won't reveal much about how the rest of Canada feels about either the Trudeau Liberals or the Poilievre Tories.

Running for the Liberals is Charles Sousa, a Liberal MPP for 11 years serving as labour, immigration and finance minister.

“It's a seat where the (Conservatives) proved to be competitive,” Graefe said. “Beating the former provincial finance minister in the riding he'd held provincially would be a feather in their cap.”

While Spengemann has won the seat three times, he did so by relatively slim margins. In 2021, he defeated Conservative candidate Michael Ras by only 3,500 votes.

When asked if he's considering Monday's byelection as a test, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters in French on Thursday that winning in Mississauga-lakeshore won't be easy.

“It's a difficult riding for us,” he said, adding the party's candidate — Peel Regional Police Sgt. Ron Chhinzer — is reflective of the riding's middle-class residents and has “real plans” to combat both inflation and crime.

“Those are people's priorities out there.”

Most notable on Monday's ballot are 34 independents — with all but three listing Winnipeg-based election activist Kieran Szuchewycz as their official agent.

Szuchewycz and his brother Tomas — also a candidate in the election — are founders of the Longest Ballot Committee, a grassroots organization pushing for election reform.

In 2017, Kieran successfully convinced an Alberta judge to strike portions of the Elections Act requiring a $1,000 cash deposit to run for federal office — a case stemming from his disqualification to run against then-prime minister Stephen Harper in his Calgary riding in 2015.

The committee declined to offer a spokesperson, directing inquires instead to candidates and statements posted online.

“People remain frustrated with the archaic and out-oftouch political system which our leaders have refused to reform, a system that results in a winner earning a minority of votes but gaining all the power,” the statement read.

Among the so-called protest candidates is Rhinoceros Party leader and committee de facto spokesperson Sebastian Corhino, who told the National Post it's foolish to expect election laws to change on their own, considering it's up to the winners of the most recent election to make that happen.

“The people who win the election are not likely to put things inside the act that will be a disadvantage for them,” he said. “It's like if the winner of the Stanley Cup could make up the rules for the next hockey season.”

During the 2015 campaign, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau ran under a banner of election reform, promising that election would be Canada's last under firstpast-the-post, and shifting toward proportional representation.

That never happened. Corhino said the campaign has attracted a lot of attention, including an alleged phone call from Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault.

That conversation, which Corhino said occurred shortly after their campaign started, included concerns that having so many names on the ballot would create problems with accessibility and voters with vision problems. “I was surprised,” he said. “He said there could be accessibility problems, and I was like, `yeah, but the ballot in Vancouver in last month's municipal elections was bigger.'”

Voters in Vancouver chose councillors from 59 candidates listed on a plurality block ballot.

Having a wide representation of non-mississauga residents on the ballot was important, said the resident of Rimouski, Que.

“Most people aren't aware it's possible — people say to me, `I didn't know you can be a candidate in a place where you don't live,'” he said.

“A lot of MPS and ministers don't live in their riding, and some don't even care about their riding — they just got there because it was an easy place to win.”

Among the slate of out-oftown candidates is Donovan Eckstrom of Grand Prairie, Alta., who said he plans on bringing a little western Canada to the Toronto suburb.

“I saw that they had a `Rodeo Dr.' in Mississauga, so I wanted to make that the place were rodeos happen,” he said.