The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - July 24, 2025


Conservatives are right to ban the Longest Ballot Committee nonsense. #cdnpoli #canadianpolitics

Topics
electoral reform popularity
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre John Horgan
7 years in prison Lich and Barber while violent criminals go free？ The Media is interfering in Pierre Poilievre's by-election! (Dishonest tactics)

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

180.38

Word count

535

Sentence count

9


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this video, I tackle the idea that electoral reform is even popular, because the Longest Ballot Committee has been trying to disrupt the voting system for years, and the system is not listening to them. In order to do so, they need 60% of the vote in order to change the electoral system, which is why they re-run referendums on the same issue every single time, and they always lose.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, so the Conservative Party is currently planning on tabling legislation in order to crack
00:00:06.480 down on the activities of the Longest Ballot Committee, but in this video I just want to give
00:00:11.880 a bit of a precursor for something I'm going to be making a longer video on tomorrow, so make sure
00:00:17.020 you're subscribed to the National Telegraph if you want to see it, and I want to tackle the idea
00:00:21.300 that electoral reform is even popular, because a way that the Longest Ballot Committee justifies
00:00:27.480 its shenanigans is by claiming that what it's pushing forward is very popular, and the fact
00:00:33.860 that the system is not listening to them requires them to try and disrupt the system by putting more
00:00:39.500 than 150 candidates on the Battle River Crowfoot ballot, where Pierre Polyev's running in the
00:00:44.400 by-election, and they've been doing this for a few years now, and it's all been justified because
00:00:49.900 we need electoral reform and the system's not listening to us. Okay, well maybe you haven't
00:00:55.860 heard, but there have been referendums on electoral reform on a provincial level in three separate
00:01:03.280 provinces, and it shouldn't shock you, but the pro-reform position got beat every single time.
00:01:11.140 Naturally, in all these referendums, you need 60% of the vote in order to change the system. We're not
00:01:16.660 going to change the entire way the electoral system operates with, you know, 51% of people wanting to
00:01:22.280 change it, and 49% not, because depending if there's a rain shower in a certain part of a province,
00:01:27.740 you know, turnout could be different, and one side could win, or one side could lose because of that,
00:01:31.860 so you want it to be decisive. The closest they've ever got is in 2005 in British Columbia, where they
00:01:39.260 had to redo it, even though they could have just said, you guys didn't win, they didn't quite get to
00:01:44.100 60%, they were 2.3% off, they let them redo it, but they changed the rules to make sure that the no side
00:01:50.880 was able to have a representative organization who could actually, you know, spend money pushing for
00:01:56.480 the no vote, basically arguing why people should vote no, because in 2005, the yes side for, I believe,
00:02:03.920 single transferable vote, basically, like, if your first option goes down, you at least get one more
00:02:09.520 party you can vote for. They were running unopposed in 2005, it was just one organization telling people
00:02:15.740 why they should vote yes, and nobody on the other side, and they still lost. In 2009, when they re-ran
00:02:21.740 the referendum, they got crushed, and then not being satisfied with being crushed in 2009 with more
00:02:27.320 fair rules, they then pushed it forward in 2018, had the backing of the premier of BC at the time,
00:02:33.280 John Horgan, and they got crushed again. So, I don't think that they actually care about democracy
00:02:40.620 when they've not listened to the voters in the three provinces where they keep losing. The other
00:02:46.380 two provinces were Ontario and PEI, and if you can't win in PEI, and you can't win in British Columbia
00:02:52.440 with the pro-electoral reform issue, it's because it's not popular in the entire country.