Montreal byelection to have most candidates in federal election history

An upcoming byelection in Montreal will have the longest ballot in the history of Canadian federal elections, breaking a record set earlier this summer in Toronto.

At least 91 candidates will be on the ballot for the Sept. 16 byelection in LaSalle—Emard—Verdun, according to Elections Canada.

Seventy-nine of them are linked to the Longest Ballot Committee, a group protesting Canada's first-past-the-post voting system. The group wants a citizens' assembly to be in charge of electoral reform, because they say political parties are too reluctant to make the government more representative of the diverse views of the electorate.

Elections Canada's final list will be available Wednesday.

Sebastien «CoRhino» Corriveau, an organizer of the protest and leader of the satirical Rhinoceros Party, hopes the campaign will raise awareness about electoral reform and proportional representation.

«It's a ridiculous way of doing stuff,» he said. «But we did try other ways before, and everything failed.»

Corriveau said when committee members went door-to-door asking for signatures to get prospective candidates on the ballot, one out of two people signed the papers.

«The voting system is not the day-to-day concern of anybody in Canada right now, but people do agree it has to change,» he said.

On June 24, the results of a byelection held in Toronto—St. Paul's were delayed for hours after84 candidates signed up to run, including 77 linked to the Longest Ballot Committee.

Elections Canada printed ballots that were nearly a metre long, with two columns of names. The agency said that compared with usual elections, the enormous ballots took longer to unfold and tally, and more ballot boxes were required to hold them.

In the end, the final count wasn't