Voting system at stake, top court hears
OTTAWA — Residents of a Toronto riding are left to wonder who will represent them in Parliament while the Supreme Court of Canada mulls a first-of-its-kind case into an overturned election, one that goes to the very heart of the democratic process.
The justices reserved their decision Tuesday in a Conservative MP’s appeal of a lower-court ruling that tossed out the result of last year’s federal election in Etobicoke Centre. Defeated Liberal candidate Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who brought the original suit in the lower courts, said the case is vital to maintain confidence in the integrity of the voting system.
If the high court upholds the lower ruling, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will have six months to call a byelection, although Wrzesnewskyj said the vote should be held as soon as possible.
“Should we win this case, it’s incumbent on the prime minister to act immediately,” he said outside the courtroom. “Democracy requires it. We can’t have this situation where we don’t know who the representative is.” Waiting the full six months would set “a terrible precedent,” he added.
Wrzesnewskyj lost the riding by just 26 votes to Conservative MP Ted Opitz. But the defeated Liberal went to court, claiming procedural irregularities.
Earlier this year, an Ontario Superior Court judge found that Elections Canada officials made clerical errors at the polls. Justice Thomas Lederer threw out 79 votes and overturned the final result.
But Opitz appealed the issue to the Supreme Court — the first time that has happened.
Only five other election results have been nullified by the courts since 1949. None of those rulings were appealed and byelections were quickly called to re-determine the will of the people in each riding.
Opitz’s lawyer, Kent Thomson, argued that the voting rights of people in Etobicoke Centre were trampled by simple record-keeping errors.
“It’s hard to think that a constitutional right of this importance could hang by so fine a thread,” he told the court.
The Etobicoke Centre result was overturned on the grounds that paperwork was not properly filled out for voters who needed someone to vouch for their identity or who were left off the list of electors.
In his ruling, Lederer specifically stressed the irregularities were the result of clerical errors by well-meaning Elections Canada officials, not the product of fraud or intentional wrongdoing.
Since then, however, Wrzesnewskyj has resurrected other more serious allegations of ballot-box stuffing and voter suppression by Opitz’s campaign, though nothing has been proven.
“People lost their franchise, they lose their right to vote. When people lose their right to vote, an election is not free,” Wrzesnewskyj said. “When ballots end up in the box that shouldn’t have been there because someone showed up without ID and without proper vouching was allowed to vote, or people were allowed to vote even though they weren’t registered, that’s not a fair election.
“Elections cannot be free if they’re not fair, and they cannot be fair if they’re not free.”
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