Terrebonne | Tatiana Auguste’s lawyer says canceling the election is “unreasonable”
(Montreal) The lawyer for a Quebec Liberal MP, who won her riding in April’s federal election by a single vote, argued Tuesday that it would be unfair to other voters to overturn the result because of an uncounted ballot.
Marc-Étienne Vien, lawyer for MP Tatiana Auguste, told a hearing in Saint-Jérôme, Que., that ordering a new election would be “unreasonable” and would disenfranchise tens of thousands of people who voted in the Terrebonne riding, north of Montreal.
According to him, canceling the election would amount to denying the right to vote of these 61,115 people.
If a new vote were to take place, he added in Superior Court, some of the people who voted in April may have since died or not be able to vote in a new by-election.
PHOTO SPENCER COLBY, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné
The Quebec Superior Court agreed to hear the case after former Bloc Québécois candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné challenged the election results in the riding. She launched this challenge after a Bloc voter revealed that her special ballot had been returned to her – and not counted – due to an address error on the envelope provided by Elections Canada.
Mme Auguste initially won the constituency, but it swung in favor of Mme Sinclair-Desgagné after the validation of the votes. A judicial recount, completed on May 10, however, concluded that the Liberals had won the riding by one vote.
Affidavits filed in the case show that an election worker discovered he had mistakenly printed his own ZIP code on several special ballots about three weeks before Election Day.
Mr. Vien told the court that mail-in voting carries well-known risks and that under the law it is not Elections Canada’s responsibility to ensure that mail-in ballots arrive at polling stations. He called the error “trivial” and argued that human error can happen to anyone and result in some votes not being cast for various reasons.
He also added that it was unclear whether the ballot in question influenced the outcome of the election.
He stated that three ballots marked for the Bloc Québécois had been found in the trash at the polling station and that they had been included in the final vote count, even though they had not been placed in the ballot box by the voter. He suggested that these votes could be discarded because their authenticity could not be confirmed, meaning that M’s margin of victoryme Auguste should have had four votes and not one.
M’s lawyerme Sinclair-Desgagné, Me Stéphane Chatigny, noted that the one-vote decision corresponded to a margin of victory of 0.000016.
Denying the right to vote to an eligible voter constitutes an irregularity that affected the outcome of the election, he found, refuting the idea that the error was trivial.
A lawyer for Elections Canada said during the hearing that he would not take a position on Ms.me Sinclair-Desgagné. He said the organization recognized that a mistake had been made during the election. David Baum referenced a 2012 Supreme Court of Canada decision that set the bar for overturning elections due to administrative errors.
The decision, he explained, placed the highest importance on the right to vote, but also concluded that elections in Canada “are not designed to achieve perfection.”
