House Committee
Hearings for Legislation to
Block Longest Ballot Project
Non-Serious Study Gives Rise to Repugnant Conclusions
In October of last year, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) conducted a study on the Longest Ballot Committee after adopting a motion in camera to do so on September 23. The study was described as "an examination of the actions of the 'Longest Ballot Committee' in recent Canadian elections [...] with a view toward furnishing the government with recommendations."
The purpose of the recommendations was not stated and the Committee saw no need to do so given that it was a foregone conclusion: the Canada Elections Act must be amended to curtail and obstruct the electoral reform campaign of the Longest Ballot Committee.
The prejudices of the members of
PROC against the Longest Ballot
were already well known before the hearings began on October 7,
2025.
Five days earlier, on October 2, when Canada's Chief Electoral
Officer
(CEO) Stéphane Perrault appeared before the Committee for its
study of
his Official Report
on the 45th General Election, the issue of the Longest Ballot
Committee
and how to stop it loomed large. Instead of deciding to study
any of
the several problems that emerged in the administration of the
April
election, including Elections Canada warning that snap elections
with
36-day campaign
periods were pushing its capacity to administer elections to the
limit,
the Committee chose the Longest Ballot Committee as the subject
for a
grand inquiry.
Longest Ballot organizer Tomas Szuchewycz appeared as the first witness on October 7. He was the sole witness involved in the electoral reform initiative invited to testify. The other witnesses for the first meeting were Peter Loewen, a political scientist who is Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, former MP Louis-Philippe Sauvé, and Dr. Lori Turnbull, Professor, Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University. Sauvé became a member of Parliament in the September 2024 LaSalle-Émard-Verdun by-election which had a 91-candidate long ballot. He lost the seat in the subsequent general election.
At its second meeting the Committee heard from David Moscrop, described as a "Politics Writer," Dr. Holly Ann Garnett, Class of 1965 Professor in Leadership, Royal Military College of Canada, Jon Pammett, Distinguished Research Professor, Political Science Department, Carleton University, and Ryan Davies of the podcast Northern Perspective.
The witnesses at the final meetings included Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Canada and Jean-François Blanchet, CEO of Québec, followed by Canada's current CEO Stéphane Perrault.
The inclusion of podcaster Ryan Davies of Northern Perspective was particularly egregious given its history of slandering the Longest Ballot Committee. Northern Perspective had produced several muckraking videos against the Longest Ballot and continues to do so. Among other things, it falsely accused the Longest Ballot of collecting nomination signatures on forms without candidate names on them, a false allegation CEO Stéphane Perrault refuted. Northern Perspective's purported evidence was provided by an anonymous "whistleblower" who was a former Longest Ballot candidate but then came to associate himself with its most vituperous opponent.
When Perrault appeared before the Committee on October 2, Conservative MP Michael Cooper and Liberal MP James Maloney both declared that Longest Ballot nomination forms were suspect, without disclosing that the source of their "evidence" was Northern Perspective. Both grilled Perrault about why Elections Canada does not authenticate nomination signatures to prevent "forgeries" by calling nominators or having returning officers visit them to find out if they really signed the forms. Aside from explaining how Returning Officers verify nomination signatures, Perrault repeatedly responded that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing in the nomination and registration of Longest Ballot candidates.
Then, during the Longest Ballot hearings, Cooper and Maloney persisted in their false allegations about Longest Ballot nomination forms being suspect. They grilled Tomas Szuchewycz on the accusation and boorishly refused to let him explain.
Conservative MP Cooper said it's not necessarily a matter of forgery: "There was evidence, for example, in the case of the Longest Ballot Committee that there were organizers going around with nomination forms and at the top where it said the name of the candidate, it was blank." Perrault responded "I'm not aware of any evidence to that effect."
Perrault informed the Committee that at the very beginning of the Longest Ballot initiative in the 2019 General Election in the riding of Regina Qu'Appelle, Elections Canada rejected forms which indicated nominators were supporting "Any and All Candidates" participating in the Longest Ballot. People were solicited for nomination signatures by being asked to nominate several candidates being recruited with the aim of having a long ballot to protest first-past-the-post and Justin Trudeau's failure to make good on his 2015 election promise to end it. The Longest Ballot Committee was told by Elections Canada that this method of collecting nominations was not acceptable and the Returning Officer registered only two of ten Longest Ballot candidates for that by-election. Since then, the nomination forms have included the names of prospective candidates.
Liberal MP Maloney joined in the unfounded accusations, revealing his utter ignorance on the matter at hand in the course of doing so. "I think we can all agree that it's outrageous. I mean, if we're being frank with each other, this thing, if it had a purpose, I'm not sure anybody understands what it is anymore. So, in my personal opinion we need to find a way to stop it. It's an issue that impacts all the parties in different ways at different times. [...] So my question is what steps can be taken to do it?"
Having no compunction about speaking without a shred of evidence he could attest to, Maloney admitted to or feigned ignorance about the Longest Ballot's aim, which is well-known. He added to his hysteria by suggesting there is a danger in Longest Ballot candidates having access to the voters' list and using it for nefarious purposes.
Slandering Longest Ballot candidates in the most egregious and boorish way without anyone raising any objection, he asked Perrault what could be done to address his concern about privacy. "[M]ost of these people who put their names on the ballot are there to create mischief," he said. Then, from out of the outer blue yonder he declared, "What protections or safeguards are in place to make sure that those people are not using the voters' list, for example to finding, you know, my address in my home so that they can, you know, put a protest group together and come and disturb my neighbours or any other thing that they may be up to because I think once you recognize they're not there for legitimate purposes, I think you then have to build extra safeguard to protect against it."
He is apparently also ignorant of the fact that all candidates, no matter whether they are affiliated with a party or not, following their nomination, obtain the list of electors for the riding in which they are running Furthermore, they are under strict Elections Canada rules about how they are used, which all candidates are bound to.
The ruling minority Liberal government and Conservative opposition were clearly united, both before and during the Committee hearings, on their proclaimed need of "doing something" to stop the Longest Ballot project. In July 2025, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre wrote to Liberal House leader Steven MacKinnon asking for election law "reforms" to "make the longest ballot scam impossible to carry out again and turn the ballot back to voters free from manipulation." It is farcical to hear the leader of the party best known for its microtargeting of electors speak about turning the "ballot back to voters free from manipulation." Why he should be listened to and not the champions of the Longest Ballot Project speaks reams about whose interests the cartel parties in the House of Commons represent.
Poilievre told the Speaker he would cooperate with the Liberals to get legislation passed for this purpose. Poilievre initially proposed a hefty increase in the number of nomination signatures required for candidates to register. Given that this would make registering their own candidates more difficult, as publicly noted by dissenting Conservatives, Poilievre seems to have had second thoughts about this proposal. In response, Steven MacKinnon told the press that his government "shares the concerns about the Longest Ballot initiative and we are currently examining this issue."
Clearly, within this committee,
there is visceral disdain and
contempt for the Longest Ballot Project and its actions. This
makes it
unfit to conduct an examination of the actions of the Longest
Ballot
Project and why it is has emerged at this time. Such an
examination
would necessitate
acknowledging the broad disaffection and discontent of the
people with
an electoral system that leaves them marginalized and
disempowered and
address that, not the morbid preoccupations of the Liberals and
Conservatives who are terrified of any electoral reform which
would
serve to empower the
people. This is the crux of the matter. It explains how they
have
managed to use their positions of power and privilege to limit
electoral reforms to measures which provide them with more money
from
the public purse, exemptions from privacy laws and state
facilitation
of their microtargeting
practices.
PROC's unacceptable "examination" of the Longest Ballot Project was conducted in true Spanish inquisition style. The heresy in this case is the Longest Ballot Project's assertion that the time has come to replace the first-past-the-post method of counting votes and that the drafting and approval of a new electoral law needs to be put into the hands of a Constituent Assembly and the people, not self-serving political parties.
It was no surprise when on March 24 PROC released its recommendations to change the Canada Elections Act to try to stop the continuation of the Longest Ballot project.
To watch PROC's October 7, 2025 hearings, click here.
This article was published in
Volume 56 Number 3 - March-April, 2026
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/M56035.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca