Michael Taube: The Political Candidate With No Votes to His Name

Commentary

Who is the first political candidate in Canadian history to record zero votes in a contested federal riding? The answer to this trivia question is Félix-Antoine Hamel, and you don’t have to go back too far in your research to retrieve it.

Hamel ended up with no votes to his name in the recent Toronto–St. Paul’s byelection. That’s the riding won by Conservative candidate Don Stewart on June 24, which had been held by Liberals for over three decades.

There were 12 candidates in Toronto–St. Paul’s who either ran under a party banner or with no affiliation. An additional 72 candidates ran as Independents in this hotly contested byelection. Of this number, 48 ended up with less than 10 votes apiece, and six were tied for second-last place with two votes.

Hamel, one of the Independent candidates, sat alone in last place. Why didn’t he vote for himself? He couldn’t for one simple reason: He doesn’t live in the riding.

Who is this political candidate that Canadian Trivial Pursuit enthusiasts will forever remember as having set a record few would want to emulate?

According to a June 26 CBC News article, he’s a 45-year-old musician living in Montreal. He reportedly put his name forward “after his friend—who works with the electoral reform advocacy group called the Longest Ballot Committee—approached him.”

The Longest Ballot Committee was established in 2021 to protest Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Hence, this group is opposed to a candidate winning a riding by a plurality of votes—which is the method used for most elections in Canada—and would prefer that proportional representation was used instead. They used to be associated with the not-so-serious Rhinoceros Party of Canada, and have maintained a small presence on social media platforms like X.

It’s fair to say the Longest Ballot Committee has had some success in finding protest candidates like Hamel to flood ballots and delay results. Their presence has been felt in five federal byelections: Saint Boniface–Saint Vital in 2021, Mississauga–Lakeshore in 2022, Winnipeg South Centre and Kitchener Centre in 2023, and now Toronto–St. Paul’s.

Hamel admitted to putting almost no effort into his campaign, and juxtaposed his presence on the ballot to that of former NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau. The 27-year-old pub manager won a seat in the Quebec riding of Berthier–Maskinongé in 2011. She was part of the late NDP leader Jack Layton’s “orange wave” in the province. This was in spite of the fact Brosseau was a paper candidate who had no political knowledge and never stepped foot in the riding. In fact, she spent three days of the federal campaign celebrating her birthday in Las Vegas.

Brosseau, to her credit, took advantage of this opportunity that unexpectedly fell into her lap. She studied and improved her French, which she hadn’t spoken since she was young. Brosseau worked hard in Ottawa on behalf of her constituents. She would ultimately become a high-ranking member of the NDP caucus, rising all the way to House leader, before losing her seat in 2019.

“Anything could happen,” Hamel told CBC News. “It’s our democracy, that’s how it works and it can be sometimes totally absurd.” That’s true, but it would be equally absurd to believe his political journey would even slightly resemble Brosseau’s journey. Other than the fact they’ll both be connected to pubs, albeit with his link solely tied to political trivia.

Hamel, who has received international coverage in UK’s Guardian newspaper and the New York Post, is clearly enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. Nevertheless, the Montreal-based musician seems relatively level-headed when it comes to his ignominious place in Canadian political history.

“I’m one of the last people that would be expected to make Canadian history in any way,” he told CBC News. “As long as I have the right and the privilege to get zero votes in an election, then we are truly in a democracy.”

That’s the whole point of this exercise. There have been political candidates in Canada who received zero votes in elections, but they ran unopposed. The last time it happened in a federal byelection was 1957, when Progressive Conservative candidate George Doucett was acclaimed in the Ontario riding of Lanark. (The farmer and insurance broker was re-elected in 1958, 1962, and 1963.) While no one had ever done what Hamel did in Toronto–St. Paul’s, the fact that he ended up with no votes proves our democracy, as imperfect as it is, does work.

Or, as Hamel humorously put it, “When I saw the result, I was like, ‘Well, I am the true unity candidate. Everyone agrees not to vote for me.’”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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