Chris Selley: We have solved the Long Ballots problem, and it didn’t take a committee

A portion of the ballot for the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton, which was targeted in a protest by the Longest Ballot Committee in the 2025 federal election. Photo by Bryan Passifiume/Postmedia/File

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Readers, I bring glad tidings: Canada has solved a problem, and solved it well.

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Don’t head to the fireworks store or plan a parade or anything; it was quite a simple problem. But Canada lets all kinds of simple problems fester and fizz without hardly lifting a finger to address them, so I do think it’s worthy of note, if only to prove that we can, and should, solve simple problems.

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The problem was the Longest Ballot Committee, which derives cheap yuks from getting as many independent candidates as possible nominated in a riding in order to make the multiple-choice ballot as long — almost a metre, in one case — and as time-consuming as possible. Ostensibly some kind of protest about the first-past-the-post voting, it’s better seen simply as trolling. The Longest Balloters are, after all, affiliated with the Rhinoceros Party.

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But the Long Balloters have stated principles, too, and they’re pretty dumb. “Long ballots are a lot of fun,” spokesperson Tomas Szuchewycz told The Canadian Press in March — fact check: false — “but most importantly they create a platform which we use to point out that politicians shouldn’t be in charge of their own election rules because it’s an obvious inappropriate conflict of interest.”

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Instead the Long Balloters want a “citizens’ assembly” — with members appointed by God, presumably, and with no political opinions or preferences of their own — to implement some form of proportional representation (PR). PR is a perfectly decent cause, in some forms at least, but whose worst feature is by far its most ardent proponents.

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Elections Canada’s solution was as follows: Instead of printing a ballot with 48 names on it for the byelection in Terrebonne, Que., last month, they just had voters write in the name of their preferred candidate. They did the same thing last year in the Battle River—Crowfoot byelection that returned Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to the House of Commons. That one had 214 candidates.

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What I like in particular about this solution, not to suggest this was Elections Canada’s intent, was that it quite elegantly undercut the argument against first-past-the-post. It reminded voters that they weren’t voting for a party or a party leader — Elections Canada made clear that “Liberal” or “Conservative” wouldn’t be counted as legitimate votes — but rather for a local representative, even if that local representative happened to be a party leader dragging a parachute around behind him.

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There’s no evidence this confused voters. The rejected-ballot totals in each byelection were well within the normal range.

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There are structural changes that might make sense to thwart the Long Balloters, and I’m not opposed to all of them. But I am opposed to one that the House of Commons’ procedures committee recently recommended: Making it illegal for someone to sign more than one candidate’s nomination form. (You need 100 signatures from qualified voters to run for MP.)