Élections Québec

Nice to talk to you as always, Tom.

You know, one of the stories we're covering this morning in the news, in the newsroom, is the CAC deciding to appeal that court ruling that forced Elections Quebec to prepare and mail out bilingual voter information cards.

So the saga continues.

That...

Supreme Court of Canada looked at this and said, you have to do the election over again.

And so this is so bizarre, because...

The gist of it is that the government believes that it can tell Elections Quebec what to do.

If I had been the person in charge of Elections Quebec, I would have said, thank you very much for your opinion, but we're going to continue doing what we're doing.

Nice to talk to you as always, Tom.

You know, one of the stories we're covering this morning in the news, in the newsroom, is the CAC deciding to appeal that court ruling that forced Elections Quebec to prepare and mail out bilingual voter information cards.

So the saga continues.

That...

When you have a government decision that is knocked down by the courts on constitutional grounds, of course they're going to appeal to a higher court.

But in the middle of an election, what they're doing, and I know I always almost have to apologize for this opinion, but my honest opinion as a lawyer who has worked in these matters for decades is that they could actually be compromising the election itself.

Because if you have a complaint brought... by someone who was denied their information didn't get on the voters list we saw that in the case of the tarabon election in the last general election by one vote the supreme court ordered them to have a redo of the election there because somebody had been given the wrong by the poll workers have been given the wrong postal code to mail in their ballot supreme court of canada looked at this and said you have to do the election over again and so this is so bizarre because The gist of it is that the government believes that it can tell Elections Quebec what to do.

If I had been the person in charge of Elections Quebec, I would have said, thank you very much for your opinion, but we're going to continue doing what we're doing.

getting to the point and getting to a political point that you stay with, you know?

I wanted to ask you about this ruling, notice from Elections Quebec to the scrutineers and so on at the polling stations that they can only, you can only speak to somebody in English if they can answer the question yes to, are you an historic Anglo or are you a member of the indigenous communities? This is Elections

Quebec again falling flat on its constitutional face.

Section 133 of the British North America Act that today we call the Constitution Act 1867 couldn't be clearer.

As Judge Sylvain Lussier said...

Ten days ago, when rendering his ruling, he said, how can you tell people that they're allowed to come into the National Assembly, that they're allowed to use English at every stage of the debates, which they're still allowed to do, but that somehow you're not going to inform them that there's an election going on or how to vote.

And it was just an aside in his ruling, but it was really pertinent because it showed the absurdity of the approach of Elections Quebec.

This is illegal.

... that, that you s- that you stay with, you know.

I wanted to ask you about, uh, this, uh, ruling, uh, notice from Elections Québec to the, uh, scrutineers and so on at the polling stations that, uh, they can only, uh, you can only, uh, speak to somebody in English if they can, uh, answer the question yes to, uh, uh, "Are you an historic Anglo or are you an, are a member of the indigenous communities?"

This is Elections Québec again falling flat on its constitutional face.

Section 133 of the British North America Act that today we call the Constitution Act 1867 couldn't be clearer.

A succession of Supreme Court cases, Andrew, going...

And the most recent ones over the past 50 years, m-m-the most important ones concerned Manitoba that has the exact same provision in six, Section 23 of the Manitoba Act.

All of the enactment process for legislation has to be in both languages.

As Judge Sylvain Lussier said 10 days ago when rendering his ruling, he said, "How can you tell people that they're allowed to come into the National Assembly, that they're allowed to use English at every stage of the debates," which they're still allowed to do, "but that somehow you're not gonna inform them that there's an election going on or how to vote?" And he, it was just an aside i-in his ruling, but it was really pertinent because it showed the absurdity of the approach of Elections Québec.

Yeah, I mean, as Stephen said, uh, legally we're, the, the, the folks on, on both sides of the camp of, of these questions, um, they can't collude [laughs] according to the law, and, and they've been doing a very good job of, of making sure that they don't run afoul of that legislation.

It's very different from Quebec as well, right? Quebec's referendum law states clearly you can only have one team on either side of a question, and Elections Quebec has a lot of authority in choosing who that might be.

I think, yeah, my, my thinking has evolved on this as well.

I think there's an expectation in a referendum that because there's two options there will be two sides.