Quotulatiousness

May 9, 2011

What’s coming up in the next set of Canada Health Act revisions

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

This is an old post from 2005, but now that we have a majority federal government, we can expect to see much or all of this program implemented fairly quickly:

As we’ve all been made aware by the constant drumbeat of media-generated panic, obesity is the biggest problem facing the Canadian healthcare system. Canadians are getting much fatter, getting less exercise, and generally imperilling their own health and, in the aggregate, the entire healthcare system — the core of the Canadian identity. The government is moving to confront this looming problem in the very near future.

Tackling Obesity

Because voluntary measures have failed, the federal government, in consultation with the provinces and territories, is going to amend the Canada Health Act, the cornerstone of the healthcare system. Poor health is no longer an individual problem: it affects the entire country. This means that the government is going to get very serious about tackling the causes of the problem, not just treating the patient after the problem becomes severe.

The current provincial health ID cards will become federalized: this is to ensure that all Canadians are able to get consistent treatment when travelling outside their home provinces. The new ID cards will carry biometric information and it will be mandatory to carry these cards at all times.

To ensure that we comply — it is for the sake of our healthcare system — the health ID card will be requested on boarding all public transit, commuter rail, airplanes, ferries, and ships. Inexpensive card readers will speed processing. No ID? No travel. Simple as that. Our healthcare system is too important to risk for minor concerns like individual rights, privacy, or freedom of movement.

It is expected that the major banks will quickly realize the advantage of integrating their ABM networks with the new universal ID card, obviating the need for them to maintain their own card issuing services. Any who do not quickly adapt will find it difficult to get government business. But it will be strictly voluntary, of course.

Once the banks have adapted, the government can phase out the production of printed money . . . there will be no need for it since you will always carry your combined ID/ATM card. This will be a boon to shopkeepers, banks, and anyone involved in handling money right now.

One of the biggest advantages of this will be that the government will be able to act decisively to combat the scourge of obesity: all food purchases will be directly traceable to show who is eating too much or too much of the wrong kind of food. Within a few years, as the existing printed “Nutrition Facts” information is encoded into RFID tags, it will be possible for your ID/ATM card to restrict the amount of food you purchase to the recommended daily allowance for your diet. Won’t that be great? You won’t even need to think about what to eat, because you’ll only be allowed to eat the “right” amount of the “right” foods, as determined by the government.

Of course, those Canadians who have allowed themselves to eat too much should not be given the same top-priority access to healthcare that their less weighty fellow citizens should have . . . overweight patients will be treated in inverse proportion to their deviation from the norm. That’s only fair, and fairness is nearly as important an aspect of Canadianness as Universal Healthcare.

There may be some bleeding hearts in the civil liberties movement who decry this extension of government power, but we can safely ignore them. The only thing that makes Canada the great place it is today is universal healthcare. This has been repeated so often that most of us accept the concept without any doubt or uncertainty.

Universal healthcare is Canada; Canada is universal healthcare.

Universal healthcare matters more than anything else, again as uncounted public opinion polls and government surveys have discovered, so anything that strengthens the healthcare system is good for Canada. Critics of the system are clearly not acting in the best interests of the healthcare of all Canadians, so we must move to suppress such unpatriotic — even treasonous — talk.

Snuffing Out Smoking

After obesity, the next greatest threat to the system is already being addressed by all levels of government: smoking. It will soon be possible, using the same combination of mandatory ID/ATM cards and RFID tags to completely stamp out the purchase of tobacco products. The government would be remiss if they failed to take full advantage of the current wave of public support to make tobacco use illegal everywhere. Canadians are naturally law-abiding: they will quickly adapt to the need for vigilance for signs of illegal tobacco use. Snitch lines may be required in certain areas to provide more support to those Canadians who want to ensure the health of their fellow citizens — and, of course, the essential healthcare system!

Other methods can be used to ensure compliance, especially in the delivery of healthcare: patients who have smoked will be required to wait longer for all services, to be fair to those patients who never smoked. In the model of “plea bargaining”, patients may be able to get faster aid by reporting others who supplied them with tobacco.

Annihilating Alcohol

Alcohol abuse is the next problem to be overcome. The cost to the healthcare system from treating the direct results of alcohol abuse are staggering. It is manifestly unfair that non-drinking Canadians must pay to rectify the self-inflicted damage of alcohol by drinkers. Earlier Canadian and American governments tried to stamp it out during the last century, but they failed. This government will not: we have the tools to enforce compliance that earlier governments lacked.

As a first step, all sales and production of alcoholic beverages will be nationalized. All citizens must apply for permits to allow them to drink alcoholic beverages, which will only be available from government outlets at strictly controlled times. Sensible limits will be applied, so that packaging that encourages abuse (24-packs of beer, 1.18 litre bottles of alcohol, etc.) will be quickly removed from use. Purchase limits will be strictly enforced, to ensure that so called “binge drinking” can be controlled and eliminated. Drunkenness will be dealt with as sabotage of the healthcare system.

Importing alcohol will be eliminated as a source of health problems, and domestic production will be gradually curtailed and then eliminated in turn. Home brewing and winemaking will be very quickly made illegal: snitch lines will certainly be needed to enforce this, but good Canadians will realize that the health of all requires us to clamp down on those who do not follow good health guidelines.

Enforcing Exercise

It’s not going to be easy to make Canadians as healthy as possible, but the vigour of our Universal Healthcare system can only be enhanced by improving the physical well-being of all Canadians. Voluntary efforts to encourage healthy exercise have been a dismal failure, so mandatory exercise is the only way to move forward. In the short term, all public and private schools, offices, factories, and other workplaces will be required to add exercise periods to every workday.

Mandatory exercise, however, will not be allowed to encourage carelessness and risk-taking — so-called “extreme” sports are all foreign concepts to Canadian culture, and should be discouraged at all cost. The healthcare system must not be held hostage to stupid, careless victims of unnecessary accidents. They’ll be in last place for healthcare services, after the obese, the smokers, and the drinkers.

The End Result

Let’s be honest . . . this is going to be a gruelling regime, and some will not have the intestinal fortitude to pull through. By phase IV of our program, we should expect to see some weaker souls emigrating to escape the rigours of our brave new healthy world. We should let them go, but ensure that they have paid a fair price for the privilege of living in the healthiest country in the world: a sliding scale tax on property maxxing out at 90% for the wealthiest.

But what a wonderful country it will be without them: everyone at the absolute peak of health and vitality (because getting sick will be illegal).

May 7, 2011

Bring Mad Max back into cabinet?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

I admit I’m rather fond of Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier, so of course I’m in favour of bringing him back into cabinet:

Mr. Harper also needs to reach out to the inner conservative that lies dormant in the hearts of most Quebecers.

How to kill these two birds with one stone? Appoint Maxime Bernier as President of the Treasury Board.

The position is open, since incumbent Stockwell Day decided not to run in the May 2 election.

Maxime Bernier hails from Beauce, a fortress of entrepreneurship in the heart of the province. He is an efficient communicator who sticks to the message. He emphasizes fiscal conservatism and individual liberties, a stance that resonates with a core of enthusiastic supporters in the province. He preaches the entrepreneurial values that lie at the very centre of Quebec’s conservative past, but are too seldom celebrated nowadays.

Lorne Gunter: Give the new MP for Las Vegas a break

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:40

It’s inevitable that the election of Ruth Ellen Brosseau in absentia would be a cause for amusement, but Lorne Gunter makes a good case that we should cut her a bit of slack:

It is common practice across the country to dig up candidates wherever they can be found and plead with them to let their names stand in ridings where a party has no chance of winning. (Or almost no chance. Ms. Brosseau’s case proves there is never NO chance of winning.)

In a past life, when I used to be a devoted Liberal party worker in Alberta, during the height of the National Energy Program, we used to use this tactic all the time: Get some campus Liberal club member to let him- or herself be nominated in a rural riding where the Tory candidate was going to capture 80% of the vote anyway, just so the party could claim it had run a candidate in all X number of ridings in the country.

On this count, I’m willing to grant Ms. Brosseau a pass, as this is what every small party faces every election: the need to get as many names on to the ballot as possible. It’s tough enough for minor parties to get any press coverage, but it’s much harder if you are only running a corporal’s guard of candidates in the election.

That being said, however, even in the days when we only ran paper candidates (no signs, no brochures, no active campaigning), the candidate was at least in the riding during the election. She should have either cancelled her trip, postponed it, or declined the nomination if she couldn’t do either.

One NDP supporter in Ms. Brosseau’s new riding asked the other day whether he and his fellow voters where victims of some sort of scam. No, sir, not victims — participants.

Who votes for someone who was never seen in the riding during the election, someone who doesn’t live anywhere near the riding, doesn’t articulate any policies and doesn’t even speak French all that well, but who is seeking to represent a constituency in which over 90% of the residents list their at-home language as French?

It’s clear the voters of Berthier-Maskinongé were so eager to vote NDP — as were so many Quebec voters — that they didn’t care who the local candidate was, which is appropriate in this case, because the local candidate didn’t care either. Ms. Brosseau was doing a favour for a friend at NDP headquarters in Ottawa, now she’s going to have to uproot her life for the next four years and go be the MP for a riding where the voters know no more about her than she knows about them.

I wrote about the allegations of fraud in the nomination papers here.

May 6, 2011

CRTC: broadband decision now in government’s hands

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Michael Geist sums up the CRTC’s universal service decision:

The CRTC issued its universal service decision this week, which included analysis of funding mechanisms for broadband access, broadband speed targets, and whether there should be a requirement to provide broadband access as part of any basic service objective. Consumers groups and many observers were left disappointed. The CRTC declined to establish new funding mechanisms (relying on market forces) or changes to basic service and hit on a target of 5 Mbps download speed (actual not advertised) to be universally available by the end of 2015. Critics argued this left consumers on their own and suggested that the targets were underwhelming, particularly when contrasted with other countries.

While I sympathize with the frustration over the CRTC’s decision to essentially make broadband a “watching brief,” I wonder why Canadians should expect the CRTC to lead on broadband targets and funding. Universal access to globally competitive broadband (in terms of speed, pricing, and consumer choice) is a perhaps the most important digital policy issue Canada faces and it should not be viewed through a narrow telecom regulatory lens.

Chris Selley on those new “orange posts”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

The new NDP youth wing gets lots of fun poked at it (some of it here), but Chris Selley has hopes that they may force the House of Commons to revisit the worst aspects of parliamentary behaviour:

Look. It’s easy, and frankly appropriate, to laugh at the gaggle of orange poteaux — “posts,” as Quebecers call cipher candidates — soon heading to Ottawa to take their seats as New Democrat MPs (and to move into their very first apartments!). But whatever their shortcomings, it’s safe to assume they’re full to bursting with idealism and self-esteem. Many of them aren’t long out of high school. Try to bully them and by God, they’ll probably call the police.

There’s 57 new NDP MPs from Quebec — almost 20% of the House of Commons. They have a real opportunity to make a difference in the way Parliament conducts its business. Jack Layton himself has said he intends to officially oppose the government in a more dignified manner. And it’s hard to think of anyone in a better position to hold him to his word than, say, a 21-year-old student with $600,000 or so coming to him over the next four years, representing a riding he’s barely visited (if at all) and constituents who didn’t (and don’t, and may never) really give a damn who he is.

The complaints of ex-MPs detailed in the Samara report go far beyond Question Period. One ex-parliamentarian said he profoundly regretted toeing the party line on an emotional issue — almost certainly same-sex marriage, although it’s not specified — and recalled colleagues weeping as they voted against their consciences. Another tells of being tasked, very early in his career, with delivering a speech on the mountain pine beetle infestation in British Columbia, which he knew absolutely nothing about, on 20 minutes’ notice.

One of the weaknesses of our system is that there are not stronger supports for MPs voting freely rather than following the direction of the party whips. The constituents are not being represented if their MP is not allowed to vote in line with their preferences but instead has to subordinate their concerns to that of the party. SSM and the long gun registry are recent examples where the outcome was dictated by party leaders refusing to allow their MPs to vote freely.

It’s good that MPs recognize, at least in hindsight, that partisanship fries their brains and makes them act like monkeys. But hindsight isn’t good enough. Unless MPs grow some … uh, courage, when it actually matters — refusing orders to act foolishly or speechify on subjects they know nothing about, or to waste hours filling chairs on “house duty” when they could be out doing something useful, or to vote against their own or their constituents’ beliefs — this is never going to change.

Rookie NDP MPs already triggering change in parliamentary procedure

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:19

From an email conversation with Jon, my former virtual landlord:

In other news, you heard about the proposal to change parliamentary procedures to accommodate the new Diaper Dippers? MPs will now be able to vote with —

  • Aye
  • Nay
  • Like OMG, whatever.

I want to be a teenage MP — it’s like winning a lottery! I take it that these kids will get their $150K+ annual salary whether they attend parliament or not, correct? Or is an MP’s pay based on some sort of performance criteria?

I can’t believe I just asked that.

ROTLMAO.

May 4, 2011

Alleged forged signatures on NDP nomination papers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:29

This is weird. It may just be a function of how little experience the campaign workers had in that riding — I know the NDP were a skeleton crew in Quebec for this election (which makes their huge haul of seats from the province even more amazing), but forging signatures? It just doesn’t add up at all. Why do I say that? Let me tell you a little story . . .

Oddly enough, I had a discussion with a Returning Officer (not the RO for my riding) a few weeks ago about nomination papers and the requirements for signatures. It was rather illuminating.

Every candidate for parliament has to submit nomination papers to the constituency’s Returning Officer within a set number of days after the writ has dropped. Many would-be candidates for smaller or less well-organized parties have to depend on going door-to-door to gather signatures, as they don’t have enough party members in the riding to meet the requirement internally. I’ve done this for Libertarian candidates, and I’m sure most of the NDP candidates in Quebec this time around had to do the same thing. (Signing the nomination paper does not mean you’re a supporter of that candidate, it merely acknowledges that you have been informed that they are hoping to run in the election.)

So, a few bare minutes before the deadline, each of the candidates has to drop off their nomination papers with all of the required signatures. Elections Canada is not a huge organization (by government standards, they’re tiny). They don’t have the resources to do an instant check of the nomination papers. What they do is to verify that each of the signatories on the list is a registered voter in the riding.

Even this low barrier can be a problem, so Elections Canada recommends that candidates provide more than the minimum 100 signatures, as some of them may not be acceptable. Once all the names have been checked, if there are still not at least 100 acceptable signatures, then the Elections Canada folks do another pass through the list, and accept signatures from people whose addresses had registered voters in the previous election (the hurdle gets even lower).

Did you notice that last little bit? If you live at an address which had one or more registered voters living there in the last election, you are deemed to be a registered voter for the purposes of signing nomination papers. Is that not a low enough hurdle to avoid the need to submit forged signatures?

Update: Here’s the Globe & Mail story.

Update the second, 6 May: Elections Canada has declared the nomination papers to be valid. The other candidates still have the opportunity to challenge the result in court, although there may not much hope for them to succeed.

He comes not to praise Ignatieff

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

Colby Cosh, that is. He has a column up at Maclean’s which he admits “was prepared in a factory that manufactures gloating. Some traces may appear.”

When I argued that Ignatieff’s long absence from the country was a problem — very, very carefully distinguishing my own argument from the content of Conservative attack ads — I was greeted with a chorus of “How dare you?” I was told I had no standing to criticize a man of Ignatieff’s intellectual attainments; by that standard, none of those who have been living Canadian politics for the last quarter-century had any right to speak — so how’d that argument work out? I was told that I was engaging in a “personal attack”; how’d the argument that personalities have nothing to do with election success work out? I was told that love for Canada is all that matters, and you can love it just as much from a distance as you do from the inside; how’d the lovefest turn out? This is not just idle gloating — and even if it is, maybe it is about time for Liberals to stop obsessing over the psychological motives of commentators and start listening. This is about whether the Liberal Party is capable of making use of criticism, even unfriendly or biased criticism, as advice. This is the question, fundamentally the only question, that will determine whether it has a future, if it wants one.

But the point he’s trying to make, other than a quite understandable bit of back-patting for his prescience back at the beginning of Ignatieff’s short run as Liberal leader, is that the back-room handlers set this up:

… this election could have been avoided if Ignatieff hadn’t been allowed to commit to a “Not another second of Conservative government” position on the 2011 budget. I don’t know what story Paul Wells will tell in his sprawling Making Of The Prime Minister 2011 feature, and if he disagrees with me I would strongly encourage you to take his word over mine. My information is that the Liberal high command was playing a calculated gambit by leaving the go/no-go choice on Jack Layton’s desk. They thought that a spring 2011 election was better for them than an autumn one or a 2012 one. And they thought that Layton, in any event, would probably be too ravaged by illness not to support the budget — in which case they were prepared to go out and blame him for every jot and tittle in that document. This makes sympathy for the Liberal braintrust very, very difficult.

The NDP’s rookie class of 2011

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Tamsin McMahon has a story about some of the (many) new NDP Members of Parliament from Quebec, including everyone’s favourite Vegas gambler, Ruth Ellen Brosseau:

At a news conference in Montreal Mr. Mulcair found himself defending the neophyte MP, saying that he would take responsibility for the riding while Ms. Brosseau brushed up on her French and that of all the NDP candidates elected in Quebec, she was the only one not fluent in the language.

Ms. Brosseau wasn’t originally chosen by the party to run in the riding. Elections Canada records show Julie Demers won the party nomination on March 23, but was moved to the riding of Bourassa, where she lost to Liberal Denis Coderre.

It must be odd enough for Ms. Brosseau, winning the seat despite being out of the country for a significant portion of the campaign, but you really have to feel sorry for Julie Demers!

Some of the troubles facing the federal Liberals

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:44

Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif lists the financial issues alone:

Whoever replaces Michael Ignatieff next week will be the Liberals’ fifth leader in five years. And he, or she, won’t be getting much of a prize. Fewer seats, less status and no keys to Stornoway.

The Liberals will also have to rebuild with less funding: fewer votes mean less public subsidy, and the NDP now receives the money allocated to the Official Opposition.

If Stephen Harper indeed eliminates public subsidies for the parties, they will be further pushed to do more with less. The Liberals will have to relearn how to talk to voters to get their money and their support.

The current system has worked well for the Liberals, allowing them to reduce their dependence on individual donations to the party. Changing that system now will be a double burden for them, as they will have to ramp up their fundraising efforts from a much-reduced base (and still facing the costs of the most recent election campaign).

May 3, 2011

Michael Geist on what the Conservative majority means for digital policies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

In short, he sees it as a mixed bag:

For example, a majority may pave the way for opening up the Canadian telecom market, which would be a welcome change. The Conservatives have focused consistently on improving Canadian competition and opening the market is the right place to start to address both Internet access (including UBB) and wireless services. The Conservatives have a chance to jump on some other issues such as following through on the digital economy strategy and ending the Election Act rules that resulted in the Twitter ban last night. They are also solidly against a number of really bad proposals — an iPod tax, new regulation of Internet video providers such as Netflix — and their majority government should put an end to those issues for the foreseeable future.

On copyright and privacy, it is more of a mixed bag.

The copyright bill is — as I described at its introduction last June — flawed but fixable. I realize that it may be reintroduced unchanged (the Wikileaks cables are not encouraging), but with the strength of a majority, there is also the strength to modify some of the provisions including the digital lock rules. Clement spoke regularly about the willingness to consider amendments and the Conservative MPs on the Bill C-32 committee were very strong. If the U.S. has exceptions for unlocking DVDs and a full fair use provision, surely Canada can too.

The Conservatives are a good news, bad news story on privacy. A fairly good privacy bill died on the order paper that will hopefully be reintroduced as it included mandatory security breach notification requirements. There will be a PIPEDA review this year and the prospect of tougher penalties for privacy violations is certainly possible. Much more troubling is the lawful access package which raises major civil liberties concerns and could be placed on the fast track.

QotD: The LCBO’s Trend Report

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

The recent LCBO report says that ‘People are buying Pinot Noir and Ripasso’. Roughly translated the message is ‘we’d like more people to buy these, and other wines in the $16–$20 range, and not the cheap South American stuff. Please be trendy and support our profits.’

[. . .]

In case you’re not clued into the workings of LCBO promotions I suggest you read the fine print on the inside back cover ‘this advertising is paid for by participating suppliers’. It’s no different than all the other fliers.

Billy Munnelly, “LCBO Trend Report”, Billy’s Best Bottles Wine Blog, 2011-04-20

Conservatives win majority, NDP break through to official opposition

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

A political earthquake in Canada, as the Liberal party vote collapses across the country and the separatist Bloc Quebecois vote collapses even further in Quebec. The result of division on the left is a majority for Stephen Harper’s Conservative party.

As I’m writing this post, the current numbers are:

  • Conservatives — 167 seats
  • New Democratic Party — 103 seats (historic high)
  • Liberals — 34 seats (with leader Michael Ignatieff losing his own seat)
  • Bloc Quebecois — 3 seats (below “official party status”, with leader Gilles Duceppe losing his own seat)
  • Greens — 1 seat (historic high, as party leader Elizabeth May wins the first Green seat in parliament)

As I posted in a Twitter update a few hours back, this is the same situation that allowed Liberal leader Jean Chretien to win three straight majorities: a divided opposition. This time, instead of the Progressive Conservatives fighting the Reform Party on the right, it’s the Liberal Party fighting the NDP on the left.

The test facing Jack Layton is how to manage his hugely inflated caucus in the new parliament (with new Quebec MP’s in the majority) and perhaps finding ways to keep the rump of the Liberal party willing to work with his new official opposition.

It must be a great day to be an NDP supporter, with historic gains for the party and new respect for leader Jack Layton.

May 2, 2011

Exit poll in Whitby-Oshawa shows Libertarian surge

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:48

A random sample of two three voters in the GTA riding of Whitby-Oshawa today showed a surge for Libertarian candidate Josh Insang. Although his numbers may not hold up over the rest of the day, he had 100% support of the voters we polled.

May 1, 2011

Repost: Ballot Box Irregularities

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:46

I first posted this article in 2004. I repost it every election:

Ballot Box Irregularities, Canadian Style

This article in Reason Hit and Run talks about the recent decision to allow partisan ballot-challengers to monitor the voting in Ohio. In Canada, these people are called “scrutineers” and they have a vital job.

No, I’m not kidding about the vital part. Each candidate has the right to appoint a scrutineer for every poll in the riding (usually only the Liberal, NDP, and Conservative parties can manage to field that much manpower). I was a scrutineer during a federal byelection in the mid-1980’s in a Toronto-area riding, but I had five polls to monitor (all were in the same school gymnasium). This was my first real experience of how dirty the political system can be.

The scrutineers have the right to challenge voters — although I don’t remember any challenges being issued at any of my polls — similar to the Ohio situation, I believe. They also have the right to be present during the vote count and to challenge the validity of individual ballots. Their job is to maximize the vote for their candidate and minimize the vote for their opponents.

Canadian ballots are pretty straightforward items: they are small, folded slips of paper with each candidate’s name listed alphabetically and a circle to indicate a vote for that candidate. A valid vote will have only one mark inside one of the circles (an X is the preferred mark). An invalid vote might have:

  • No markings at all (a blank ballot)
  • More than one circle marked (a spoiled ballot)
  • Some mark other than an X (this is where the scrutineers become important).

After the polls close, the poll clerk and the Deputy Returning Officer (DRO) secure the unused ballots and then open the ballot box in the presence of any accredited scrutineers. The clerk and DRO then count all the ballots, indicating valid votes for candidates and invalid ballots. The scrutineers can challenge any ballot and it must be set aside and reconsidered after the rest of the ballots are counted.

A challenged ballot must be defended by one of the scrutineers or it is considered to be invalid and the vote is not counted. The clerk and DRO have the power to make the decision, but in practice a noisy scrutineer can usually bully the DRO into accepting all their challenges. I didn’t realize just how easy it was to screw with the system until I’d been a scrutineer and watched it happen over and over again.

This is the key reason why minor party candidates poll so badly in Canadian elections: they don’t have enough (or, in many cases, any) scrutineers to defend their votes. In my experience in that Toronto-area byelection, I personally saved nearly 4% of the total vote my candidate received (in the entire riding) by counter-challenging challenged ballots. We totalled just over 400 votes in the riding (in just about 100 polls) — 21 of them in my polls. I got 15 of those votes allowed, when they would otherwise have been disallowed by the DRO.

There was no legal reason to disallow those votes: they were clearly marked with an X and had no other marks on them; they were challenged because they were votes for a minor candidate. As it was, I had a heck of a time running from poll to poll in order to get my counter-challenges in (I probably missed a few votes by not being able to get back to a poll in time).

The Libertarians only had six or seven scrutineers, covering less than a third of the polls in this riding. If the challenge rate was typical in my poll, then instead of the 400-odd votes, we actually received nearly 2000 votes — but most of them were not counted.

Yes, even 2000 votes would not have swung the election, but 2000 people willing to vote for a “fringe” party would be a good argument against those “throwing away your vote” criticisms. Voters are weird creatures in some ways: they like to feel that their votes actually matter. Voting for someone who espouses views you like, then discovering that only a few others feel the same way will discourage most voters from voting that way again in future.

Another reason that minor party votes matter (that I neglected to mention in the original post) is that parties receive funding based on their vote totals in the previous election. Disallowing minor party votes also deprives those parties of the funding they would otherwise be entitled to next time around. For the bigger parties, this is trivial, but for minor parties, this may be critical to them being able to stay active — and visible to voters — between elections.

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