J-man
Deity
"The Prime Minister arrives meets with governor general and recommend the dissolution of parliament."
So, all it takes to dissolve the parliament is ONE person.
Canadian Federal Election coming on September 20.
- Thread starter Valka D'Ur
- Start date
"The Prime Minister arrives meets with governor general and recommend the dissolution of parliament."
So, all it takes to dissolve the parliament is ONE person.
I see we have very different ideas of what is "unwieldy."
I just don't see why the workers in one polling district should need the names and addresses of voters from different polling districts. Polling districts are based on your address, so if someone living in the south part of town wants to vote, they have a place there, rather than wandering all over town and picking somewhere near a fast food joint.
I think I mentioned this when talking about a plebiscite I worked on, back in the '80s. The council wanted to know how the electorate felt about repealing the bylaw that made it illegal for most stores and businesses to open on Sunday, so they held a plebiscite for it. The polling station I worked at was about 3 blocks from my home, in the lobby of the theatre where I worked backstage. A huge turnout was not expected for this vote, so our station had only one team - one DRO, one Poll Clerk, and me (my official title was Constable, but I was basically the "keeper of the map and dictionary definition of the word 'repeal'").
The City was so paranoid that any of us might inadvertently influence people's votes, that we were forbidden to explain the definition of "repeal". Instead, I was given a slip of paper on which a basic dictionary definition was given, and when people asked, "What does 'repeal' mean?" I had to tell them, "Sorry, I am not allowed to explain it to you, but here is the dictionary definition."
Some were okay with that, and others were annoyed. They still weren't sure and didn't understand why I wasn't allowed to explain it to them. I told them it was so I didn't accidentally influence how they voted (which was to be either a Yes or No - Yes meant being in favor of repealing, and No being against repealing). They said, "Come on, we trust you not to do that!" but of course I really couldn't, no matter how much I wanted to.
One thing that made that day frustrating was when the local radio station told people they could vote at any polling station they wanted. That was NOT the case. People still had to go to the same polling station they would for a municipal election - usually a school or city-owned cultural/recreation building that was in the neighborhood.
So we had people turning up from all over town, and the <censored> DRO decided to cut me out of the process, it being my job to ascertain if they were actually at the right polling station and if not, use the map to figure out where they should go to vote. But this woman just beckoned them forward, "Over here, ma'am/sir!" and she told the clerk to take down their address.
And then after the clerk started writing down the address, a 15-watt lightbulb went off in the DRO's brain or a much larger one went off in my brain and we realized that these people were not at the right station.
Finally I told her, "Look, it's MY JOB to figure out if the voters should be here. It's a waste of everyone's time to call them over and only after you start writing their name and address down, you figure out they should be somewhere else. LET ME DO MY JOB."
She wasn't happy, the voters who didn't understand the definition of "repeal" weren't happy, and one person actually phoned our station, saying, "I just voted, and I'm not sure I voted the right way." They told me their view of Sunday shopping and what they had voted, and then asked, "Did I do the right thing?" (meaning had the vote matched what they wanted). I had to tell them (even though it would have been great to say yes, your vote matched how you feel and reassure them) that I was not allowed to say anything, and in any case, once they voted, they could not come back and do it over. All I could do was tell them to call City Hall and talk to them about it - I just didn't have the authority to answer their questions.
The final vote of the night was a family of 3 people. They were three very tired, frustrated, and somewhat panicked people who ran in just before 8 pm (closing time) and said they'd been to three different polling stations and every time it had been the wrong one. They were desperately hoping this was the right one.
Well, the <censored> DRO did her thing of "Over here, ma'am/sir!"... and then, after they told her their address, she said, "No, you can't vote here."
They were very upset, and getting a bit angry at that, saying the last place had told them to come here. So I took the map, and told the DRO, "I've got the map, and will figure this out."
The DRO started fuming, but I just spread the map out and asked them, "What is your address?"
They told me, and I realized it was out past the wildlife sanctuary interpretive centre, where I worked in the bookstore and gave astronomy talks. So I knew generally where, but the kicker would be if they were in the city or county (the DRO insisted they were in the county, and county residents were not allowed to vote in this plebiscite).
I found the place where they lived, and said, "I need to confirm this: Do you live on the east side or the west side of the road?" East was county, west was city.
They lived on the west side, and I realized that they lived on one of the three or four little urban acreages out past the wildlife sanctuary, and I used to babysit their neighbors' kids some years before. The people in this part of town are clustered right up against the boundary between city and county, and it's literally a matter of a few feet that separates the two.
So I told them, "It's okay, you can vote."
To this day I have never seen three more grateful people. By this time we should have been closed, but the rule is that anyone physically inside a polling station or lined up for one at closing time is still allowed to vote. The clerk took down their address, the DRO gave them their ballots, and they voted.
The last thing they said to me was to thank me, and mention how frustrating it was for people to not understand that they lived in the city, not the county. "We can't even get a pizza delivered!" one of them said, just before they left.
What a frustrating day. But I count it as a victory for every time I could straighten out a problem, or reassure people that they were in the right place, or point them to where they should be and someone there would help them.
And it was nice that the bylaw was repealed. We've had Sunday shopping ever since.
Two, actually. The Prime Minister to ask, and the GG to agree."The Prime Minister arrives meets with governor general and recommend the dissolution of parliament."
So, all it takes to dissolve the parliament is ONE person.
Technically, the Governor-General can say no to this. There are times when they damn well should say no. If Trudeau decides we need yet another election before his new mandate is up, I suspect this GG may very well say no, and invite the CPC to form government if they have the confidence of the House (they'd need a coalition to pull it off - them plus the Bloc, plus the NDP... unlikely, but possible).
But in practice, the GG almost never refuses. The exception... well, the King-Byng Affair is a prime example.
Zardnaar
Deity
You can do that but they get checked later and you'll get pinged.
I was surprised when I heard they manage this, but as voting is compulsory there so if they did not it would mean you could not go on holiday when there was a vote on.
You would likely be turned away. I had this case once as an election worker. The name was already checked, so the voter had to be turned away. The mark was made by the early shift, so I don't know what exactly happened.
And if you detect that someone supposedly voted multiple times, then what? You cannot undo the fraudulent votes afterwards.
You can try to punish the person, who in case of identity theft might be innocent.
If you have a specific location a voter must go to, you can prevent the duplicate votes from happening.
Vote by mail? I am on holiday, so I would likely not be able to vote this Sunday (and since I am in a different country, being able to choose the location won't help, either). But since neither the day of the election nor the time of the holiday were a complete surprise, I was able to vote by mail before I left.
Gelion
Retired Captain
I like the word dominion. Maybe a good word.
Your election workers go in shifts?
Here, it's a very long 12-15-hour day, and that's if there is an average number of voters. Larger turnouts mean even longer days, which is unfortunate for the workers as they're paid a flat amount, not by the hour (the only time Elections Canada paid me by the hour was when I worked in the Returning Office and as a revising agent).
There are reports on the news here of lineups of people that took 2 hours to get through, because EC drastically cut down on the number of stations inside. I really don't see the logic of dozens or hundreds of people all crammed together in a lineup outside, while everything was social-distanced inside. The workers inside had see-through barriers, masks, and sanitizer, so they were safe. But if they wanted to keep the polling station open until midnight or later (4-5 hours AFTER they should have closed and done the counting)... pfft, their call. Some EC workers do make minimum wage or better, but some don't. Adding another 4-5 hours to what should be a 12-14 hour day, with no extra compensation would make some workers rightly pissed off, and some of them will likely not come back next time.
Uncle Sparky
Pheasant Plucker
This varied widely by riding, and was the result of the 'fourth wave' in various provinces and what restrictions were in place locally. In most provinces schools were not being used as voting places; in previous elections, some ridings had the majority of voting places in schools. There were a dearth of potential voting places in some high density urban ridings. Some local returning offices were very creative in creating polling places - in Winnipeg, an IKEA was used in one riding. In another Winnipeg riding industrial trailers were set up in parking lots and used.
As COVID restrictions changed during the election in some provinces/municipalities. A couple of ridings in Toronto proper lost many of their voting spaces, with Toronto Centre going from 109 spaces to 22. Many large condo buildings originally had agreed to host polls, but had to renege when restrictions tightened. The local DRO didn't have time to make the required changes.
I think we can agree that this wasn't a good time to hold an election.
Apparently most apparent double voting ends up being ppl who cast an ordinary vote on the day after already having had other arrangements made. Often it is an error with someone who initially went and ordered a postal vote then it wasn't cancelled (either due to person forgetting, or AEC error) when they voted in person. Not really related to the ability to go to a different suburb on election day. Sometimes it can be age and mental issue related confusion... say, someone in aged or other care, who have a vote through the special teams that go to those places to collect votes, but then they also get taken by a relative to vote on election day too.
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This is a significant point. Compulsory voting puts the onus on the electoral administration to make voting as easy and accessible as possible, rather than doing the bare minimum and then expecting people to comply with rules and restrictions.
You don't get 95% turnout just by mandating it with a token semi-enforced fine, it takes a supportive electoral administration that keeps on top of enrolment accuracy (now including auto enrolment from tax and lithe data) and minimises barriers.
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"The Prime Minister arrives meets with governor general and recommend the dissolution of parliament."
So, all it takes to dissolve the parliament is ONE person.
Yeah, the technical mechanism by which parliaments are established and dissolved in Westminster systems is via the power of the monarch. In places other than the UK that means a governor or governor general is doing the formal stamping of it. This is in contrast to how a lot of other constitutional monarchies have their legislatures set up - as I understand it the Nordic ones for instance never dissolve at all, are a permanent standing body, and may fully run their own electoral affairs with elections set by a legislative or constitutional schedule.
In Australia the only parliament which technically does not dissolve and establishes and prorogues itself is the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly. The other 8 are done by the viceroy standing in for the Queen.
99% of the time it is just a formal mechanism for giving effect to decisions of government, and governors and governors-general are selected for royal appointment by the government of the day, so they're not a hostile or adversarial figure under most circumstances. They are also expected to act on the advice of the head of government according to a set of conventions and written laws. You aren't going to see a G-G just march in and shut things down for no reason.
However, the arrangement has definitely been the source of constitutional crisis more than once across the Commonwealth realms. The fact that a prime minister and governor general can both technically sack each other, is in particular a real flaw. And a lot of the powers are substantial but undefined and not used only by convention.
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Industrial trailers? With steps up to them? Did they have ramps for voters using wheeled mobility devices? Apparently that's supposed to be compulsory, but there are some polling stations where the Returning Officer actually couldn't give a damn about disabled voters and doesn't bother ensuring complete access. This is one of the things that happened during the fiasco of an election in 2015. Some advance polling stations were on the second floor of buildings (they're not supposed to do that), but I suppose it was approved because there was an elevator in the building. However... the advance polling was held over Thanksgiving weekend, and the person who normally had the key to the elevator took off for the long weekend, EC had no way to unlock the elevator so it could be used, and that resulted in any voters using mobility devices or seniors being unable to climb stairs were not able to vote.
DROs don't make that call, as they only work at the polling stations they're assigned to. It's the Returning Officer's job.
I think this is Trudeau's last term of office. Even if things don't get too much worse, people are not going to forgive him for this. If there's an afterlife, Pierre is probably face-palming and muttering (in French), "Justin, WTH were you thinking?"
Here, when a mail-in ballot is sent out, the person's name is crossed off the voter's list, and that line drawn through it will be part of the papers the Poll Clerk has for that voting station. So if you have a problem with the mail-in ballot, you're stuck. You cannot go to vote in person, because you're on record as having already voted.
That's a good point. Many people detested our former GG, Julie Payette, from the get-go. Part of it was blatant prejudice and misogyny; there are an awful lot of conservatives here who don't think women should be chosen as Governor-General (granted, every single one we've had has made some spectacular missteps, from Jeanne Sauve closing the grounds at Rideau Hall to the public, to Adrienne Clarkson getting above herself and still happily spending her way through her annual post-GG expense account, to Michaelle Jean being photographed eating raw seal meat and allowing Stephen Harper to prorogue Parliament twice, to Julie Payette's reign of terror on her own employees with bouts of really bad temper and verbal abuse - she's the only GG who has ever been forced to resign before being fired).
It's Payette who annoys me most. She was a breath of fresh air at first - she's basically a modern Renaissance woman, extraordinarily smart and talented in many fields, and she was an astronaut with two shuttle missions and was the first Canadian on the International Space Station. But people were unhappy that she was not only a woman, but a French-Canadian woman, and OMG, an astronaut. The condescending phrase "space cadet" was thrown around frequently on the CBC comment pages. I rather suspect that if Trudeau had chosen one of our male astronauts (ie. Chris Hadfield), that phrase would never have been used. Hadfield commanded the ISS for six months, and has been a fantastic ambassador for space and science in general. But I doubt he would have accepted a GG appointment anyway. Not that it would have been offered, as the tradition is to alternate francophone and anglophone GGs and the previous GG to Payette was a male anglophone.
Our current GG is female, but here's a twist: She doesn't speak French. GGs are supposed to be fluent in both official languages, and I suppose you could say she's fluent in two official territorial languages - English and Inuktitut. But Inuktitut is only official in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. It won't fly for Throne Speeches, state visits, or other events. So she's promised to learn French.
I believe this doesn't happen until after the ballot is returned and the post election counting happens, since obviously plans change and some postal ballots don't come back. They certainly don't open the postal ballot for counting, or separate it from its identifying info, til after the polls close on election day. Postals trickle in for like a week and a half after the election itself, but in small enough numbers it only influences the outcome in a couple of the very closest seats.
Uncle Sparky
Pheasant Plucker
Yes. I wanted to post a picture, but it is behind a newspaper's paywall...
Can you post a screenshot?
Uncle Sparky
Pheasant Plucker
Not from that site.
5 Manitoba takeaways from the 2021 federal election | CBC News
One used in the advanced and on e-day is half way through this article.
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