By Lori Turnbull

July 27, 2025

For the second time this year, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s name will appear on one of the longest electoral ballots in Canadian history. Poilievre — and nearly 200 other people — are candidates in a byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot following the resignation of Conservative MP Damien Kurek to make way for Poilievre’s return to the House of Commons after his April loss in Carleton.

Most of these candidates are affiliated with the Longest Ballot Committee, a group seeking to draw attention to itself by flooding ballots with as many candidates as possible in high-profile ridings. Mr. Poilievre has called these actions a “scam” and a “blatant abuse” of electoral democracy. He’s right. The Longest Ballot Committee’s ballot-hijacking has no democratic value, serves no public purpose, and stands no chance of setting up a serious conversation about electoral reform. But Canadian democracy is strong enough to handle this kind of nonsense without overreacting. Let’s not dignify their stunts with a response – especially not a legislative one.

Spokespeople for the Longest Ballot Committee claim that their objective is to start a public dialogue about changing the way we run elections. They take issue with the fact that politicians and political parties are the ones who decide the rules of engagement when it comes to voting, citing a conflict of interest because they stand to benefit from the rules they design. The Longest Ballot Committee argues that a citizens’ assembly is the best and fairest way to make decisions about how electoral democracy works in Canada, including the timing of elections and which electoral system we use.

To be fair, many people would agree with their stated objectives. Electoral reform advocacy has been alive and well in Canada for years and, as we learned when former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau abandoned his promise of electoral reform back in 2017, there is reason to think that politicians – especially the ones who win enough votes to form government – are deeply reluctant to change the rules.

But let’s call B.S. on the tactics of the Longest Ballot Committee, which are disconnected from its stated goal and potentially damaging to the democracy that they claim to care so much about. Long ballots are not a design flaw of first-past-the-post systems. In fact, if we were to switch to a proportional system like the single transferable vote, our ballots would be longer because parties would run more than one candidate in multi-member ridings.

What the Longest Ballot Committee is really doing is mocking the provisions in our election law that make the ballot accessible, particularly to independent candidates without powerful networks, all while claiming to have a beef with the concentration of power in the hands of political parties.

Their actions prove how easy it is to get one’s name on a ballot. All you need to do is obtain the signatures of 100 people living in the riding and have an official agent file your paperwork. You don’t even have to live in the riding. The Longest Ballot Committee helps their affiliated candidates to meet this threshold by having constituents sign multiple candidates’ forms and by having the same official agent file on behalf of numerous candidates, all of which is permitted under the law.

Essentially, the Longest Ballot Committee is doing the signature collection work that would normally be absorbed by a single candidate and then using that list for as many willing participants as they can find.

The fact that election law allows eligible individuals to run in whatever riding they want – not necessarily the riding they live in – means that the Committee can draw from a larger pool of people willing to attach their names to this endeavour.

Let’s call B.S. on the tactics of the Longest Ballot Committee, which are disconnected from its stated goal and potentially damaging to the democracy that they claim to care so much about.

The Longest Ballot Committee has targeted several ridings over the past few years, including Carleton in the 2025 general election and Toronto-St. Paul’s in the byelection of 2024. Its candidates’ vote share, even when added together, has been negligible. In Carleton, none of them won any more than .1% of the vote. So, committed politicians needn’t worry that the Committee’s efforts will result in vote-splitting. Voters aren’t biting.

Further, there is zero evidence that these stunts have led to any kind of serious discussion about electoral reform. If anything, their tactics undermine their message by making them look like high school pranksters with too much time on their hands.

If the Longest Ballot Committee is having any effect on democracy at all, it is a negative one. It is possible that ballots with so many names on them will be confusing to voters. It is also possible that serious independent candidates, like Bonnie Critchley in Battle River-Crowfoot, will have a very difficult time distinguishing themselves from other independent candidates on the ballot.

But the true victims of the Longest Ballot Committee are the staff at Elections Canada who are stuck counting three-foot ballots into the wee hours of the morning. It is their unhappy job to pour over these things with a fine-toothed comb, searching for the voter’s X and ensuring that the ballot is not spoiled.

In a letter to Liberal House leader Steven MacKinnon in which he calls for legislation to ban long-ballot shenanigans, Mr. Poilievre wrote the following of those candidates affiliated with the Longest Ballot Committee: “They aren’t real candidates. They aren’t campaigning. They aren’t engaging with constituents.” Again, he’s right.

Poilievre is suggesting we combat long ballots by requiring that candidates obtain signatures from 0.5% of a riding’s population rather than the current requirement of 100 signatures. Also, he says that official agents should not be permitted to represent more than one candidate and that voters should not be permitted to sign more than one form. His ideas, if passed into law, would blow up every aspect of the Longest Ballot Committee’s strategy. This is tempting, but we should not write or amend election law based on bad faith actors.

These rules would make it more difficult for good faith independent candidates to throw their hats in the ring, which would further entrench the power of political parties as gatekeepers of electoral democracy. Let’s not give the Longest Ballot Committee the satisfaction of proving their point. And frankly, it’s already hard enough to get people to run for office. We should not make it a steeper climb.

Democracy is meant to be accessible to everyone. Otherwise, we cannot meaningfully and truthfully claim that our constitutional right to political equality is real. There will be times when individuals or groups take advantage of this just to get their names in the paper, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Any measure taken to make the ballot less accessible to jokers will apply equally to people who want to run for the right reasons. It’s not worth the sacrifice.

Policy Columnist Lori Turnbull is a professor in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University.