Elections Canada Acts Outside Elections Act Making Things Difficult For Smaller Parties

We need your help, be sure to just skip to the bottom if you don’t care about the background.

The Elections Act is very specific: Every three years a political party must show that it has 250 electors who support it. We would provide 300 just incase some members were not on the registry or had not updated their information on the registry.

This year, however, Elections Canada is doing things different. Instead of validating our forms using the information provided (information that would be hard to obtain fraudulently), they are now validating all parties membership by mailing them forms to validate their membership. This provides multiple levels that our members can fail verification:

• They can have an address that hasn’t been updated with Elections Canada
• They can’t be in any transient living situation where they move within 3 months of filling out the form or wont know where they will be in 3 months.
• They must mail us a form with all the details properly filled out, including putting their birthday on the form where many people sign with the current date (because in other forms that’s where you would put the current date, making the form confusing)
• The form must make it to us by mail (no digital copies) and then make it from us to Elections Canada by mail, and then the validation form must make it from Elections Canada to them by mail, then they must get it back to Elections Canada by mail again.

These are just a few of the issues with the new audit procedure by Elections Canada and it’s no wonder that of our 275 signatures that we turned in initially this year only 90 of them passed all these levels of validation.

The problem, however, is with this additional level of validation Elections Canada is essentially asking us for 750 members to sign the forms. Instead of the old system which required us to get a 25% buffer, the new system requires that we achieve a 250% buffer. This is acting well outside of a reasonable view of the Elections Act.

We have sent a more detailed complaint to the Elections Commissioner, who oversees violations of the Elections Act and we anticipate they will rule in our favour.

We Need Your Help

If you have not already filled out a form (or never got a verification letter from Elections Canada), please Download This Form and mail it to:

Pirate Party of Canada ICO Travis McCrea
1601-788 Jervis St
Vancouver, BC V6E0B5

While we fully anticipate a judgement in our favour regarding these abusive new audit procedures by Elections Canada we also need to be prepared for the worst and that means trying to get up to 750 signatures. If you have already filled out the form, make sure you print another and get someone else to fill it out too.

I appreciate all your effort and we will overcome any obstacle that is given to us because we are the Pirate Party and ingenuity is our greatest strength. We succeed together.

– Travis McCrea

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