The Longest Ballot Losers are killing the most important night in Canadian politics

One riding will decide who controls the House of Commons. Instead of an 11 PM result, we’re getting a 'guerrilla marketing' stunt that does nothing but annoy everyone else.

If you’re a political nerd like me (and if you’re reading this, you clearly are), you enjoy a good by-election night.

They’re a fun little pitstop between general elections - a chance to get a sense of where the parties actually stand. Sometimes they tell you a lot, sometimes they tell you nothing at all, but they tell you SOMETHING.

A few years back, when CBC started running live, wall-to-wall broadcasts of these races, I was right there in the middle of it. It was electric. It was a ratings hit. It was a hell of a lot of fun. We’d watch the returns trickle in, debate the swings, and usually have a final result by 11:00 PM.

But the Longest Ballot Committee is doing its level best to kill that vibe forever.

The news out of the Globe and Mail yesterday is that these guys are planning to flood the Terrebonne by-election on April 13 with a massive slate of candidates.

And frankly? I’m pissed.

This isn’t just an annoying prank anymore; it’s a direct assault on the mechanics of our democracy (and the enjoyment of the process!)

Let’s be clear: Terrebonne isn’t just some random Quebec riding. This might be the single most consequential by-election in our country’s history.

For the first time, a single seat could determine whether we have a majority government or a minority.

Yes, if Mark Carney’s Liberals sweep the two “safe” Toronto seats (Scarborough Southwest and University - Rosedale), they technically hit the magic number. But my colleague at NorthStar Public Affairs, Éric-Antoine Ménard, flagged a major procedural trap that almost everyone else had missed: because of recent changes to the Standing Orders, a tie-breaking vote from the Speaker isn’t enough to give the Liberals true, functioning control over the House and - crucially - the Committees.

To actually run the show without constant opposition roadblocks, they need Terrebonne.

We should be glued to our screens on election night to see what happens in the riding that was basically a tie between the Liberals and the Bloc last spring.

Instead, thanks to the Longest Ballot, we’re looking at another 4:00 AM finish. We saw this movie in Toronto-St. Paul’s. We saw it again in the general election when Pierre Poilievre’s seat took until sunrise to count because the ballots were a metre long.

When you turn a federal ballot into a three-foot CVS receipt, you aren't ‘championing your cause’ - you're just being a nuisance. You’re making the Elections Canada workers’ lives a living hell and ensuring that by the time the result is known, everyone but the most caffeinated partisans has gone to bed. You’re killing the “communal moment” of an election.

The most infuriating part? These “Longest Ballot” losers aren’t even winning people over to their cause. They claim they want proportional representation. Fine. I’ve actually been sympathetic to electoral reform in the past.

Think about it: we use ranked ballots to choose our local EDA boards, our party candidates and leaders, and our national executives. If we think that’s the fairest way to pick a local candidate, why are we so terrified of it for MPs? It’s a fair question.

But I can tell you one thing for certain: nobody is going to join the proportional representation camp because they were forced to squint at a three-foot ballot at a polling station. This isn’t “guerrilla marketing”; it’s shooting your own cause in the foot.

The Bottom Line: These stunts are going to force Parliament to crack down and make it harder for anyone to get on a ballot. The LBC is literally breaking the door down so they can complain that the door is now locked.

They need to grow up and go away before they do even more damage to the system they claim to want to improve.

In the meantime, keep the coffee brewing for April 13. It’s going to be a long night -and because of these Longest Ballot losers - an unnecessarily late one.