Advance polls open in Alberta byelection with 214 candidates, historic blank ballots
CAMROSE — Advance polls in a historic federal byelection for Alberta's Battle River-Crowfoot open today.
For the first time ever, Elections Canada says voters must fill out a blank ballot.
The agency lists a record 214 candidates running in the rural riding, with voting day on Aug. 18.
The majority are part of the Longest Ballot Committee, a protest group calling for various changes to Canada's electoral system.
Prime Minister Mark Carney called the byelection in June after Conservative Damien Kurek, who handily won the seat in the April general election, stepped down so Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre could run.
Poilievre lost his long-held Ottawa seat of Carleton.
The byelection also features Liberal candidate Darcy Spady, the NDP's Katherine Swampy and Independent Bonnie Critchley.
Elections Canada says there have been some exceptions to its regular ballot. Adapted ballots with two columns have been used in elections with a higher-than-usual number of candidates.
In this byelection, it's not just marking an x. Voters must handwrite the name of their preferred candidate in a blank space.
'Their vote will be counted, even if they misspell the candidate's name,' said agency spokesperson Matthew McKenna.
'They can also include the name of the political party. However, if they write only the name of a political party, their ballot cannot be counted. The candidate's name has to be there.'
A list of all candidates in large-print will be at polling stations for electors to refer to, he added. The agency's website also said magnifiers and large-grip pencils will be available.
Poll workers have been given extra training. McKenna said there are ways they can assist electors with ballots, and the counting process will be different.
Poilievre repeated his frustration Thursday with the longest ballot initiative. More than 90 candidates were on the ballot when he ran in Carleton.
'I don't have a problem with anyone who wants to run for office, even if they're not known or not wealthy,' he said at an unrelated news conference in Calgary.
'But that's not what these people are doing ... they just want to inundate the ballot to confuse the situation, make it harder for people to vote. People with vision problems, the elderly, others who have difficulty now will have a harder time voting.'
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 8, 2025.
Fakiha Baig, The Canadian Press
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
44 minutes ago
- CBC
Alberta government changes expense disclosure policy, removes eight years of records
Social Sharing While many Albertans were preparing for a long weekend last Friday, the provincial government published changes to its rules for disclosing expense claims made by senior officials. The new policy, published Aug. 1, removes a requirement that the premier, ministers, deputy ministers and senior staff must publicly disclose receipts for expenses over $100. In keeping with a new provision introduced in the policy that published expense reports be available for five years, the government also removed eight years of expense reports that were previously available on its website. Marisa Breeze, press secretary to Finance Minister Nate Horner, said in a statement that the changes were made to "improve government operations and reduce red tape," and to bring Alberta's policies into alignment with other provinces. "Our government remains committed to the highest transparency and accountability standards." Not everyone agrees. "All of these changes diminish transparency," said a statement from Information and Privacy Commissioner Diane McLeod. "Our office has no knowledge of the rationale for the changes." James Turk, executive director of Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Free Expression, said the new policy was clearly "lowering" existing standards. "There should be very limited restrictions on what the public has a right to know." Years of expense reports no longer available The previous policy, dated April 30, 2020, applied to a wide range of government positions, from cabinet members to executive managers. Public disclosure of receipts was required only for the premier, ministers, associate ministers and political staff. According to Treasury Board and Finance, receipts are still required to be provided when claiming expenses, but they will no longer be made public. Before being published, receipts and invoices were required to be redacted to protect personal information. The expense reports can be viewed on the government's website, and are also available for download as a dataset. In the first five months of 2025, there are more than two dozen expense claims over $100 for Premier Danielle Smith personally, as well as more than 200 for ministers and nearly 300 for chiefs of staff. Under the new policy, those receipts will no longer be publicly disclosed. A newly added provision in the policy states that published expense reports "must remain publicly accessible online for five years after its publication." The previous policy did not have any minimum time frame. According to a copy of the dataset downloaded by CBC News prior to the changes, the available records previously went back to 2012. However, the data now begins in 2020, with eight years of expense reports having been removed from public view. The dataset that was available until recently had about 600,000 entries, with each entry being an expense claim by a government employee or official. The current dataset has approximately 100,000 entries. In other words, roughly half a million expense claims spanning eight years have been removed. "It sounds like they're assuring they'll be there for five years, but in fact they've been there historically longer," said Turk. "The net result is that the five years is a maximum. So there's going to be much less access to records than there was under the previous [policy]." According to Breeze, the data was removed to enhance "system performance, as the volume of data hosted on the public site currently exceeds the tools capacity to efficiently download and process it," as well as "to be consistent with the public disclosure of salary and severance under Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act." However, the regulations for that legislation describe the five-year disclosure period as a minimum, not a maximum. Breeze did not answer questions to clarify how the changes relate to that legislation. Reaction from opposition, auditor general "It's absolutely shameful," said Christina Gray, house leader of the Alberta NDP. "No longer requiring [disclosure of] receipts is a way of obfuscating or hiding. It's a way to hide what's actually being spent and what's happening in a way that I know Albertans would not support. "At the same time, the government scrubbing eight years of records limits the ability to compare this government spending to previous governments." Gray drew a contrast between Premier Danielle Smith's expressions of support for increased government transparency while in opposition and actions taken by her government, including a recent rewrite of access to information legislation that many experts — including McLeod and Turk — viewed as reducing transparency. "Here we see these changes being made on a Friday before a long weekend with absolutely no notice, no disclosure — and these rules are not something that change often, so a deliberate choice was made," said Gray. The Office of the Auditor General provided a statement saying they aren't able "to provide any context for the changes, as our officer was not consulted or informed about the rationale behind them." Policies vary across Canada The Alberta legislature has its own disclosure rules that apply to all MLAs, separate from expenses while performing government business. Members' expenses are posted online within 30 days of the end of each quarter. Those public disclosures include receipts, except for expense categories that are capped or are counted by a non-financial unit, such as kilometres or days. Outside Alberta, the rules around government expense disclosures vary by province. Ontario requires disclosure within 90 days of approval of an expense claim, and the information must remain publicly available for at least two years. However, receipts are not published. In British Columbia, travel expenses are published quarterly for ministers and monthly for deputy ministers, and receipts of ministers are publicly disclosed. Turk said Alberta should seek to be a leader in transparency standards rather than weakening its rules to match those of other jurisdictions. "In other words, we don't want provinces going to the lowest common denominator," he said.
CTV News
14 hours ago
- CTV News
Mayoral candidate to move desk onto street for ‘Listening Tour'
Andrew Knack on Alberta Primetime on May 23, 2025. As Edmonton's mayoral race marches on, one candidate is choosing an unconventional way to show constituents he's listening. Current Coun. Andrew Knack is launching the official opening of his campaign office with a city-wide 'Edmonton, I'm Listening Tour,' which involves taking his full-sized work desk out on public streets. His first stop will be on Sunday outside his Gateway Boulevard office. Knack and a group of volunteers will be moving the desk to various locations across the city during the tour. A release on Saturday said the move is meant to help Knack in 'meeting people where they are and inviting them to share their priorities for Edmonton's future.' 'The campaign office – and Listening Tour locations – will be open to all Edmontonians who want to build a stronger Edmonton,' the release read. Knack is a longtime city councillor for Ward Nakota Isga who announced his bid to be Edmonton's next mayor in May. His official campaign launched in mid-June. Knack, who says he's running as an independent, is vying for the position alongside a growing number of candidates. The list of hopeful nominees includes current Ward pihêsiwin councillor Tim Cartmell, pediatric surgeon Omar Mohammad, engineer Abdul Malik Chukwudi and more. Edmonton's current mayor, Amarjeet Sohi, has said he won't be seeking re-election after losing as the federal Liberal party's candidate in the Edmonton Southeast riding. The election is Oct. 20. With files from CTV News Edmonton's Brittany Ekelund and Alex Antoneshyn
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Globe and Mail
Alberta Insider: Advance voting begins in by-election that can return Poilievre to the Commons
Good morning! Wendy Cox here this morning filling in for a vacationing Mark Iype. Voters in Alberta's Battle River-Crowfoot riding have their first chance at advance voting today in a by-election that could return Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to the House of Commons. Mr. Poilievre is widely expected to win. He's explicitly running in the seat far, far away from the Ottawa-area riding he had held for two decades but lost to the Liberals in the last election. Battle River-Crowfoot is considered one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. Damien Kurek won the seat with 82 per cent of the vote in April and had held it since 2019, but gave it up for Mr. Poilievre. Rather than marking an X, voters will have to write a name in a blank on their ballot, a first in a Canadian election. (Elections Canada assures misspelled names will still be accepted as a vote.) Some 214 candidates have signed up to run, many of whom don't live in Alberta, much less the riding, and most of them running with no intent to win on Aug. 18. The protest candidates are part of the Longest Ballot Committee, a group calling for changes to Canada's electoral system. This is the fourth time Alex Banks has run in an election – the first was last year in the Toronto-St. Paul's federal by-election. He told Globe reporter Emily Haws his participating is a fun form of protest for a cause he believes in. 'I thought it was a low-impact, high-visibility way' to protest in favour of electoral reform, he said. 'You're not shutting down streets. You're not interfering in people's daily lives, but you're clearly making a point.' The group contends that politicians face a conflict of interest in making election laws, and that those decisions should instead be made by an independent, non-partisan body such as a citizens' assembly. The committee itself does not have a demand for any particular set of election rules. Rather, it's a demand that politicians recuse themselves from the process. The ballot paper resulting from so many candidates would be so long as to gum up the process for counting ballots. The Longest Ballot Committee was once in league with Canada's long-standing satire party the Rhinoceros Party, which once had a campaign promise to repeal the law of gravity. (Columnist Campbell Clark described the Rhinos as the 'merry pranksters of Canadian politics.') In 2019, the committee said it wanted to set a Guinness Book of World Record for the longest ballot ever, but it fell far short: The Guinness Book lists the record at 1,187 candidates, who ran in the Prague municipal elections in 1994. But Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault is not amused. He has been outspoken about long ballots, which he says create confusion for voters and challenges in counting and processing results. Perrault has called for the federal government to bring in penalties for individuals who are responsible for stacking ballots with independent candidates. The Globe's editorial board is even less amused, writing that the group 'is weaponizing the good intentions underpinning electoral rules, which are meant to give candidates a relatively easy path to get on the ballot.' To get on a ballot, candidates need the signatures of at least 100 voters – only 50 in some ridings – and have an official agent to file paperwork. Living in the riding isn't mandatory, a good thing for Poilievre. The Globe notes the committee has been able to round up so many candidates in part by having voters sign multiple nomination papers. The group's spokesperson, Tomas Szuchewycz, was listed as the official agent for 199 nominations as of Monday. Candidates don't have to do the work of convincing their fellow Canadians; the committee does it for them with a copy-and-paste system. But the voices of actual independent candidates get drowned out, the editorial board argues. Independent candidate Bonnie Critchley pleaded with the group in May in a Facebook post not to bring its disruptive campaign to Battle River-Crowfoot. 'Your actions make it impossible for electors to be able to find anyone who isn't attached to a party,' she wrote in an open letter on Facebook. 'You are further pushing us into a party system.' The editorial board concludes that far from the fun Mr. Banks appears to be having, the Longest Ballot Committee is conducting 'electoral sabotage.' This is Alberta newsletter written by Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you're reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
