The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - Conservatives are right to ban the Longest Ballot Committee nonsense. #cdnpoli #canadianpolitics

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.

The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - July 24, 2025