Nunavik needs an election day do-over

Elections Canada’s apology offers a bit of comfort but it doesn’t change the fact that thousands of Nunavik voters were denied their right to vote in Monday’s federal election.

Liberal Mandy Gull-Masty defeated the Bloc Québécois incumbent Sylvie Bérubé by 2,197 votes in the Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou riding, but the results are sufficiently tainted by irregularities that they should be set aside and a new vote held.

Canada’s election law allows for a voter to contest the results of an election where there are “irregularities.” That’s what some Nunavik voter should do — contest the outcome, ask a judge to set aside the result, and force Elections Canada to do it over. Correctly.

In what chief electoral officer Stéphane Perrault admitted Wednesday were “shortcomings of our services,” half of the villages in Nunavik encountered serious problems with voting on Monday.

Not having enough pencils for every ballot box is a shortcoming. Preventing thousands of people from casting ballots is an egregious failure.

Polling stations in some communities didn’t open at all, while others saw the window for voting reduced to two hours instead of the seven and a half they were expected to be open for.

Nunatsiaq News learned of the problems Monday afternoon — as the election was taking place. At the time, Stephen Grasser, a regional councillor in Salluit, said there was “a whole bunch of confusion.”

It quickly became apparent it was more than just confusing. It was a disaster. And it was widespread.

“We need help urgently,” Ivujivik Mayor Adamie Kalingo told a Nunatsiaq News reporter.

Confusion was an apt description at the time. There were reports that elections workers were travelling from village to village on a chartered plane, trying to hit as many communities as they could to at least give them an abbreviated opportunity to vote.

But they left early because they were worried the weather would turn.

Would Nunavimmiut who were not able to vote have been enough to change Monday’s outcome? Probably not.

For Bérubé to win, she would have needed almost all the votes in the affected communities and for those communities to have extraordinarily high voter turnout rates — closer to the national rate of 68.4 per cent than the riding’s 46.4 per cent.

But that’s not the point.

Makivvik, the Inuit rights-holding organization in Nunavik, demanded on Tuesday an investigation into what went wrong.

“This is unacceptable in 2025,” Makivvik wrote in its statement, saying the organization was “deeply disappointed by the handling of the voting process.”

It is indeed unacceptable. That’s why an investigation alone isn’t sufficient.

Elections Canada hasn’t yet provided an adequate explanation for what went wrong, but Perrault said his agency “will review” what happened, and he vowed to publish the findings.

But even that is not enough. The results should be set aside.

Watching election results come in on TV Monday night, it was surprising that national networks didn’t pick up on the problems in Nunavik. Reporters are constantly on the lookout for that kind of election day irregularity — a man-bites-dog example of the system not working the way it’s supposed to.

You’d hate to think that it’s easier to ignore the screwup because it happened in remote, northern, Inuit communities. But if 5,000 people in seven urban communities in the south had been overlooked or neglected on election day, it would be a federal case, the national media would be all over it. There would be hell to pay.