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Justin Trudeau is getting crushed by a mess of his own making
The prime minister abandoned his pledge to reform Canadian democracy. The whole country is paying the price
When voters stepped into polling booths across midtown Toronto Monday, they were confronted with a scroll of a ballot: 84 candidates’ names on a meter-long piece of paper.
There was Julie St. Amand, whose fuzzy alt-rock campaign jingle proclaimed she is “feisty, opinionated, ready to hold a grudge.” And Donovan Eckstrom, who campaigned from Alberta with an appeal to “stop voting for Torontonians, start voting for Albertans, ya dorks.” And there was Sean Carson, the flagbearer for the Rhinoceros Party — the group who organized the Longest Ballot Committee.
And, sure enough, nearly 1,000 voters in Toronto–St Paul’s threw their vote away for one of dozens of semi-serious candidates. They, together, claimed roughly the number of votes earned by the Green Party and more than twice the margin that separated Liberal favourite Leslie Church and Conservative upstart Don Stewart.
Much will be written about what Stewart’s shocking victory Monday means for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The queries of ’should he stay or should he go?’ will be constant this summer. That’s understandable. Voters seem pretty sick of Trudeau and more than willing to give Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives a go
But we should also consider these byelection results on their own. They represent a productive cough for our ailing democracy. The impossibly-long ballot was a case of chickens coming home to roost for Trudeau, who nine years ago explicitly promised to reform Canada’s electoral system.
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