Toronto-St Paul’s byelection: Candidate makes history with zero votes
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Monday night’s by-election in Toronto-St Paul’s was a devastating defeat for the Liberals, but it also marked perhaps the only time in Canadian history that a candidate for elected office received zero votes.
The byelection broke the all-time Canadian record for longest electoral ballot. An activist group upset at the Trudeau government’s abandonment of electoral reform conspired to fill the ballot with paper candidates, resulting in more than 80 names contesting the riding.
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According to early results, the protest candidates all garnered at least a couple throwaway votes, except for one: Felix-Antoine Hamel, who got zero.
Hamel doesn’t live in the riding and thus couldn’t vote for himself, and something about his name apparently dissuaded Toronto protest voters from picking him as their preferred throwaway candidate.
He’s certainly the first federal candidate in modern Canadian history not to receive a single vote, and he may well be the first in the history of Confederation, if not British North America generally.
As to who Hamel is, his filings with Elections Canada reveal only that his official agent is Kieran Szuchewycz, the same agent for all the other protest candidates. But he does share a name with a Montreal free jazz saxophonist who once worked at a Plateau bookstore.
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