What is my riding? What do the polls say? And is anything being done to stop Russia from interfering? Read our 2019 federal election FAQ.
A voter walks past a polling station sign for the Canadian federal election in Cremona, Alta., Monday, Oct. 19, 2015. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh)
Originally published: April 22, 2019 Latest update: April 22, 2019
When is the election?
That depends. It’s scheduled to be on Oct. 21 of this year—that’s what’s spelled out in the Canada Elections Act. But our fixed-date elections aren’t really all that fixed. In theory, Canadian elections should be held every four years in October, but the Governor-General, on the advice of the Prime Minister, can call an election at any time. That’s a fundamental reality of our Westminster system that no legislation can change.Elections can also be triggered if a minority government loses a confidence vote, or even, conceivably, if a government with a parliamentary majority gets sloppy and is caught with too-few members in the House during a critical vote. This almost happened last month. But barring any more such excitement, and assuming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn’t decide to risk a snap early vote, Canadians will vote on Oct. 21.
Who’s running?
It’s too soon to answer that question in its totality for each of Canada’s 338 ridings—that number will remain the same in 2019—but in general terms, the major parties will be the Liberals, who’ll fight to retain their majority, the Conservatives, who’ll want to unseat the Liberals to form a government, and the New Democratic Party, who’ll want to grow their distant-third-place status into something a bit more competitive with the other two major parties. The Green party will run, of course, and the Bloc Quebecois, in Quebec. Former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier’s new People’s Party of Canada intends to run candidates in 2019. It’s too soon to say how big a factor they’ll be.In terms of leaders, of the major parties, only the Liberals expect to go in with the same leader they had last time. Andrew Scheer, the Conservative who replaced former prime minister Stephen Harper, is an experienced Parliamentarian, but has never led the party into a national campaign. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is an experienced politician, but served previously in the Ontario legislature; he was only elected to Parliament last month. This campaign will be his first as leader of the national party.
Where do I find my riding?
Elections Canada can help with that—just put your postal code in here.What do the latest polls say?
A strong Liberal polling advantage has been gradually eroding over time, setting up a competitive 2019 race, where the Liberals would still hold a real but not massive advantage. But the SNC-Lavalin affair and the various associated mini-crises have had a measurable and sustained impact on Liberal polling numbers. With the obvious proviso that we’re still six months (or so) out from the vote, the latest polling suggests that it’s the Conservatives who’d most likely win the most seats if the election were held today—but the same polls suggest that they’d be hard-pressed to lock up a majority. It’s impossible to make a more specific guess right now; suffice it to say things are looking a lot more interesting than most would have guessed as recently as six months ago.See 338Canada.ca for Philippe Fournier’s latest electoral projections.
What are some of the key issues likely to be?
In general terms, and assuming no new huge (metaphorical, hopefully) bombshells over the next six months, the Liberals are likely to run as a party devoted to the middle-class, the environment and defending progressive values, especially inclusiveness, in a turbulent world. This will involve accusing the opposition, mainly Conservatives, of intolerance.The Conservatives, for their part, will hammer the Liberals on high spending, accountability and transparency, and the costs of the Liberals’ carbon-pricing plans, which are being bitterly resisted by right-wing provincial governments across the country, including, now, Alberta, under premier-designate Jason Kenney.
The NDP will probably try to reclaim the left, which was deftly seized by the Liberals in the 2015 election.
The People’s Party will presumably run to the right of the Tories, all while accusing them of being essentially Liberal-lite. In other words, it will all seem awfully familiar. The SNC-Lavalin scandal may also continue to weigh on the voters, though it does finally seem to be running out of steam.
What voting system will we use?
Despite Liberal promises ahead of the last election, first-past-the-post—same as the last one, and all the ones before it.What do I need to vote? Has anything changed?
Elections Canada has you covered on that front. The one big change is that voters will be allowed to use the Voter Information Card mailed to them by Elections Canada as their proof of residence when they show up at the polling station. They will still need another piece of ID, though, to prove their identity.The system is designed to make it easy to vote—the bar for establishing your identity isn’t particularly high. Perhaps the only real interesting wrinkle is that, thanks to a Supreme Court of Canada ruling late last year, long-term ex-pat Canadians living abroad will be entitled to vote in the riding they lived in last. The Liberals also passed legislation to that effect, but even if they hadn’t, the SCC ruling took care of that.
Are robocalls legal? And why is Andrew Scheer sending me text messages? Can I make that stop?
Robocalls are certainly legal, so long as they’re properly paid for and reported as an election expense, and do not contain content that seeks to disrupt the democratic process (if you recall, the so-called “robocalls scandal” began when voters received phone calls providing false or misleading information about their local polling stations).In a similar fashion, there’s nothing stopping parties from sending text messages to the cellphones of voters, as the Conservatives recently did when attacking carbon-tax measures in certain provinces. Voters might be annoyed by the texts, but so long as they’re done in accordance with financial and reporting requirements, they’re legitimate.
Will Russia try to interfere in the election? What’s being done to stop it?
A series of Western countries (notably including the United States) have had foreign intelligence services attempt to interfere with their election campaigns. The attacks have been largely but not exclusively linked back to Russia. Using fake social media accounts—so-called “bots”—and fake news, the foreign services have worked to amp up social division and political polarization as much as aid any specific candidate.The Canadian government announced a plan to safeguard the integrity of our elections in January, but much of the plan will depend on the willingness of the political parties to put country ahead of their own interests, and also of the social media giants like Facebook to co-operate with Canadian officials. Neither of those things can be taken for granted. Canada does have one thing going for it, though: we still use paper ballots, a hack-proof analog technology that should at least prevent any concern over actual manipulation of voting totals.
Apr 22, 2019
Why the federal election might not happen on Oct. 21
The set date is a high holy day for Jews, with possible implications in some battleground ridings. A court battle this week could force a shift.
Jul 15, 2019
A woman marks her ballot in the riding of Vaudreuil-Soulanges, west of Montreal, on Oct. 19, 2015 (THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Graham Hughes)
Chani Aryeh-Bain had just four days to soak in her victory before the trouble began. On April 14, 2019, the 51-year-old mother of five handily clinched the nomination to run for Parliament under the Conservative banner in her lifelong riding of Eglinton–Lawrence in midtown Toronto. She was so excited, she didn’t take a good look at the election calendar until days later. Nobody on her team did.
“We did not clue into the extent of the disadvantage immediately,” says Ira Walfish, a community activist who volunteered for Aryeh-Bain. Four days after she secured the nomination, Aryeh-Bain crafted a worried email to Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, requesting he change the date of the federal election. They hoped for the best, but Walfish remembers the team’s mindset at the time: “This is not gonna go well.”
The solution could have been simple: move Canada’s federal election date to Oct. 28. The problem? The date is currently set for Oct. 21, which is also, in 2019, a somewhat obscure but important Jewish holiday called Shemini Atzeret.
Most non-Jews haven’t heard of Shemini Atzeret. (Many non-religious Jews haven’t, either; even the etymological origins of the Hebrew word “atzeret” are vague.) It is nonetheless a high holy day, following a flurry of the most sacred holidays in Judaism, which together block off huge swaths of September and October in any observant Jew’s calendar.
“Shemini Atzeret is the vacation to recover from the holiday,” writes Carla Naumburg in an article titled “In Which I Finally Figure Out What Shemini Atzeret Is”, published in Kveller, a magazine for Jewish mothers. “To just chill and take it all in, to stop, pause, hold back, and keep in.”
The holiday’s loose definition is perhaps why Perrault, upon seeing Aryeh-Bain’s email, did not respond with any urgency for three weeks. When he finally did, according to court documents, Perrault called the timing “unfortunate,” but noted Elections Canada did not choose the date and the election was too soon to alter.
That didn’t satisfy Aryeh-Bain, and the broader Jewish community slowly awoke to the problem at hand. Over subsequent months, Jewish leaders, activists and several Liberal MPs—including Aryeh-Bain’s incumbent opponent, Marco Mendicino—all wrote to Perrault, urging him to move the date. Failing that, community organizations hoped for some kind of compromise. Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, wrote in an op-ed in the Toronto Star that they asked Perrault to add another polling day convenient for observant Jews. “Elections Canada has never explained why it did not pursue this least-disruptive course of action,” he wrote.
The only option, after so many letters, was a legal battle. Aryeh-Bain and Walfish mounted a lawsuit against Elections Canada in June, scheduled to be heard in Toronto’s Federal Court this week, on July 16. Elections Canada is not responding to queries about it, but in March, a spokesperson told The Canadian Jewish News that voters can always use advanced polls or apply for special ballots before Oct. 15. Critics argue those measures are insufficient—data suggest 75 per cent of those Canadians who actually vote do so on election day, while three per cent choose convoluted special ballots—while even advanced polls are obscured by the minefield of autumnal Jewish holidays and weekly Shabbat services. While most Canadians will enjoy 60 hours’ worth of voting opportunities this year, observant Jews are limited to just 17.
In their application, Walfish cites a community of 75,000 observant Jews who will be directly affected by the conflicting date, while their evidence includes more than 140 concerned letters written to Elections Canada. Modern Orthodoxy is the second-most prominent sect among self-identified Jewish Canadians after Conservatism, according to a recent report by the Environics Institute; with approximately 350,000 Jews across the country, the impact of the decision could be significant.
“It’s a major problem,” Walfish emphasizes. “This keeps happening. It’s like, hello? Get out a calendar. It’s in the [Canada Elections] Act. Just move the stupid election…. They can move it if they want to. I can’t change the religion.”
Walfish points to the precedents supporting their case. In 2007, Ontario’s provincial election also coincided with Shemini Atzeret—and the government agreed to change that date. Conversely, in Oct. 2018, Elections Quebec declined to compromise after learning that, once again, it coincided with the same holiday.
“The turnout was dramatically affected,” recalls David Tordjman, a modern Orthodox candidate running this year for the Conservative Party in Mount Royal, Que. Tordjman might have even more to lose than Aryeh-Bain: last October, voter turnout in neighbouring D’Arcy-McGee, Quebec’s most densely Jewish riding, plummeted from 72 per cent to 44 per cent, due to overcrowding and hours-long lineups at poorly managed advance polling stations. This year, Tordjman sees the same frustration across social media.
“The issue, at the end of the day, is accessibility,” he says. “All we want is the same capacity and the same amount of time to vote.”
Both Tordjman’s and Aryeh-Bain’s ridings are home to more than 20,000 Jews, according to the 2011 National Household Survey, and both are potentially crumbling Liberal strongholds. Liberal Joe Volpe ran Eglinton–Lawrence for 20 years until Stephen Harper’s future finance minister, Joe Oliver, ousted him in 2011; in 2015, Mendicino narrowly won it back by fewer than 3,500 votes. Mount Royal, once Pierre Trudeau’s stalwart base, was run by legendary Jewish MP Irwin Cotler for 16 years until he resigned, passing the mantle to Liberal Anthony Housefather in 2015.
In 2019, under a simmering froth of negative sentiment toward Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and newly elected right-leaning provincial governments, both are potentially battleground ridings—especially Eglinton–Lawrence. As it stands, Aryeh-Bain “will be precluded from getting out the vote on the most important day of the election,” the court application states. “In short, she must fight the election with one hand tied behind her back.”
There is a very real chance, if the date remains unchanged, that Shemini Atzeret could decide the riding. If it does, this won’t be the last court battle mounted against the government—if not this election cycle, then perhaps next time an election falls on Shemini Atzeret, which can’t be too far away.
CORRECTION, July 15, 2019: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect estimate of the number of Jewish people in the ridings of Eglinton–Lawrence and Mount Royal
“We did not clue into the extent of the disadvantage immediately,” says Ira Walfish, a community activist who volunteered for Aryeh-Bain. Four days after she secured the nomination, Aryeh-Bain crafted a worried email to Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer, Stéphane Perrault, requesting he change the date of the federal election. They hoped for the best, but Walfish remembers the team’s mindset at the time: “This is not gonna go well.”
The solution could have been simple: move Canada’s federal election date to Oct. 28. The problem? The date is currently set for Oct. 21, which is also, in 2019, a somewhat obscure but important Jewish holiday called Shemini Atzeret.
Most non-Jews haven’t heard of Shemini Atzeret. (Many non-religious Jews haven’t, either; even the etymological origins of the Hebrew word “atzeret” are vague.) It is nonetheless a high holy day, following a flurry of the most sacred holidays in Judaism, which together block off huge swaths of September and October in any observant Jew’s calendar.
“Shemini Atzeret is the vacation to recover from the holiday,” writes Carla Naumburg in an article titled “In Which I Finally Figure Out What Shemini Atzeret Is”, published in Kveller, a magazine for Jewish mothers. “To just chill and take it all in, to stop, pause, hold back, and keep in.”
READ MORE: This week’s 338Canada projection: All bets are offAryeh-Bain and many of her team members and volunteers, including Walfish, are modern Orthodox Jews—not black-hat Hasidic, but they strictly keep kosher and observe Shabbat and other holidays. Despite Shemini Atzeret’s comical ambiguity, observant Jews are strictly forbidden from working or travelling on the day, and are instead encouraged to reflect and pray. They definitely can’t canvas constituents to vote. Indeed, they can’t even vote.
The holiday’s loose definition is perhaps why Perrault, upon seeing Aryeh-Bain’s email, did not respond with any urgency for three weeks. When he finally did, according to court documents, Perrault called the timing “unfortunate,” but noted Elections Canada did not choose the date and the election was too soon to alter.
That didn’t satisfy Aryeh-Bain, and the broader Jewish community slowly awoke to the problem at hand. Over subsequent months, Jewish leaders, activists and several Liberal MPs—including Aryeh-Bain’s incumbent opponent, Marco Mendicino—all wrote to Perrault, urging him to move the date. Failing that, community organizations hoped for some kind of compromise. Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, wrote in an op-ed in the Toronto Star that they asked Perrault to add another polling day convenient for observant Jews. “Elections Canada has never explained why it did not pursue this least-disruptive course of action,” he wrote.
The only option, after so many letters, was a legal battle. Aryeh-Bain and Walfish mounted a lawsuit against Elections Canada in June, scheduled to be heard in Toronto’s Federal Court this week, on July 16. Elections Canada is not responding to queries about it, but in March, a spokesperson told The Canadian Jewish News that voters can always use advanced polls or apply for special ballots before Oct. 15. Critics argue those measures are insufficient—data suggest 75 per cent of those Canadians who actually vote do so on election day, while three per cent choose convoluted special ballots—while even advanced polls are obscured by the minefield of autumnal Jewish holidays and weekly Shabbat services. While most Canadians will enjoy 60 hours’ worth of voting opportunities this year, observant Jews are limited to just 17.
In their application, Walfish cites a community of 75,000 observant Jews who will be directly affected by the conflicting date, while their evidence includes more than 140 concerned letters written to Elections Canada. Modern Orthodoxy is the second-most prominent sect among self-identified Jewish Canadians after Conservatism, according to a recent report by the Environics Institute; with approximately 350,000 Jews across the country, the impact of the decision could be significant.
“It’s a major problem,” Walfish emphasizes. “This keeps happening. It’s like, hello? Get out a calendar. It’s in the [Canada Elections] Act. Just move the stupid election…. They can move it if they want to. I can’t change the religion.”
Walfish points to the precedents supporting their case. In 2007, Ontario’s provincial election also coincided with Shemini Atzeret—and the government agreed to change that date. Conversely, in Oct. 2018, Elections Quebec declined to compromise after learning that, once again, it coincided with the same holiday.
“The turnout was dramatically affected,” recalls David Tordjman, a modern Orthodox candidate running this year for the Conservative Party in Mount Royal, Que. Tordjman might have even more to lose than Aryeh-Bain: last October, voter turnout in neighbouring D’Arcy-McGee, Quebec’s most densely Jewish riding, plummeted from 72 per cent to 44 per cent, due to overcrowding and hours-long lineups at poorly managed advance polling stations. This year, Tordjman sees the same frustration across social media.
“The issue, at the end of the day, is accessibility,” he says. “All we want is the same capacity and the same amount of time to vote.”
Both Tordjman’s and Aryeh-Bain’s ridings are home to more than 20,000 Jews, according to the 2011 National Household Survey, and both are potentially crumbling Liberal strongholds. Liberal Joe Volpe ran Eglinton–Lawrence for 20 years until Stephen Harper’s future finance minister, Joe Oliver, ousted him in 2011; in 2015, Mendicino narrowly won it back by fewer than 3,500 votes. Mount Royal, once Pierre Trudeau’s stalwart base, was run by legendary Jewish MP Irwin Cotler for 16 years until he resigned, passing the mantle to Liberal Anthony Housefather in 2015.
In 2019, under a simmering froth of negative sentiment toward Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and newly elected right-leaning provincial governments, both are potentially battleground ridings—especially Eglinton–Lawrence. As it stands, Aryeh-Bain “will be precluded from getting out the vote on the most important day of the election,” the court application states. “In short, she must fight the election with one hand tied behind her back.”
There is a very real chance, if the date remains unchanged, that Shemini Atzeret could decide the riding. If it does, this won’t be the last court battle mounted against the government—if not this election cycle, then perhaps next time an election falls on Shemini Atzeret, which can’t be too far away.
CORRECTION, July 15, 2019: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect estimate of the number of Jewish people in the ridings of Eglinton–Lawrence and Mount Royal
No comments:
Post a Comment