It’s notoriously hard to get a Canadian election overturned. Damn near impossible, in fact… but Dick Proctor and Moe Kovatch may be about to do just that.
It seems a few hundred voters in the riding Regina-Lumsden-Lake Centre (hopefully to be renamed “Rumsdentre” for the sake of brevity) may have been told to vote in the riding of Palliser. Given that the people telling them were Elections Canada, the voters in question would probably have believed them.
And given that Elections Canada’s mandate did not, as of June 28, 2004, include running cultural exchange programs between ridings, that would probably qualify as a “mistake”. (That’s as opposed to the Liberals saying voting Grit in Palliser was the only way to stop the Tories, which qualifies as an “outright lie”.)
Mistakes happen, of course, but this one had real consequences. With the Conservatives beating the NDP by only 124 votes in Palliser, and the Liberals by only 122 votes in Rumsdentre (see how catchy that is? Just rolls off the tongue), this slip-up could have spelled the difference between a stable, possibly even progressive House of Commons, and the situation we have now.
So now various interested parties are poring over various lists, checking addresses and, for good measure, looking for references to Eileen Dover, Fay K’name and Sue Donimm. (In this latter task, the judge and parties’ counsel will be guided by both the Canada Elections Act and the precedents set down by the Supreme Court of Canada in Regina vs. Phil Ayshio, Connie Lingus et al.)
With a little luck, byelections will come soon to those two ridings in Saskatchewan. And as a special bonus for the diluted democracy they had back in June, voters there won’t feel forced to vote Liberal to keep Stephen Harper from becoming Prime Minister. That’s good news for all the progressive-minded people of Palliser and Rumsdentre.
Pass that name along: Rumsdentre. We can make it happen, people.
