The case of a single vote which determined the outcome of a federal election in Canada risks sending the “disastrous message” to voters that “some votes count more than others”, says the lawyer of a former MP as a court considers whether to void the controversial election and hold a new vote.
Legal teams in Quebec are midway through a three-day hearing over whether a single vote – and an administrative error – truly swayed a recent election in a suburb north of Montreal.
Bloc Québécois member Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné lost the electoral district of Terrebonne to Liberal Tatiana Auguste in the April vote.
The Liberals currently hold 169 seats in the House of Commons, just shy of the 172 needed to form a majority. The Bloc Québécois holds 22 seats.
The vote was initially marred by confusion, when Auguste was projected to emerge as the winner after final tallies showed her ahead by 35 votes. But an official validation process on 1 May instead found that Sinclair-Desgagné, first elected in 2021, finished ahead by 44 votes.
Under election law, a judicial recount is triggered automatically when the number of votes separating the winner and any other candidate is less than 0.1% of the valid votes cast. The recount, completed on Saturday, was overseen by a Quebec court judge.
The win was returned to Auguste, with the Liberal candidate receiving 23,352 votes and Sinclair-Desgagné receiving 23,351.
Within days, however, Terrebonne resident Emmanuelle Bossé said her vote was not included in the final count. Bossé said she voted for Sinclair-Desgagné but her mailed ballot was returned to her due to a postal code error.
“I wasn’t the one who got Elections Canada’s address wrong on the envelope,” she told CBC’s Radio-Canada. “Elections Canada glued this label on the envelope. I had nothing to fill. I just had to put my vote in there.” Bossé mailed her ballot on 5 April and it was returned to her nearly a month later on 2 May.
Sinclair-Desgagné’s lawyer, Stéphane Chatigny, said in court that Bossé’s Charter rights were violated because her ballot was not counted and that upholding the election result would “send a disastrous message to voters that even Elections Canada … can make mistakes, but that there will be no consequences despite the decisive impact on the outcome of the election”.
“By refusing to cancel the election, the court would send the message that some votes count more than others,” said Chatigny. “Such an outcome would permanently undermine public confidence.”
At the heading, Justice Éric Dufour raised a 2012 supreme court of Canada decision, Opitz v Wrzesnewskyj, which found simple clerical errors were not enough to annul the election. Instead, the court found there must be proof that the number of ineligible votes could have changed the outcome in order to justify voiding an election result and calling a new vote.
