The fallout from last week’s leaders’ debates continues, with a filing in Federal Court from the Green Party saying the independent commission’s decision to exclude it from the debates was unfair and lacked transparency.
The party filed an application for a judicial review Thursday evening, saying the last-minute decision violated principles of procedural fairness.
The filing alleges that “at no time did the [Green Party of Canada] intentionally withdraw any of its candidates,” that it was given little time to explain itself on the eve of the debate and that it was following the rules outlined by the commission.
The document recounts how the commission informed the party in the early morning of April 16, the day of the French-language debate, that it would not be allowed to participate in that debate and the English-language one the following night. It says CBC/Radio-Canada, which was hosting the debates, was informed of the Greens’ absence ahead of the party itself.
“They broke their own rules and it obviously is unhelpful, and not just to the Green Party. It’s unhelpful to voters,” said co-Leader Elizabeth May in an interview with CBC News. “It’s breathtakingly unfair.”
May said it was too late for the party to benefit from any Federal Court decision for this election, but that she hoped it would improve the commission’s decision-making moving forward.
The Leaders’ Debates Commission — the independent body tasked with organizing the debates — said the Green Party no longer met participation requirements because of the discrepancy between the number of endorsed candidates it submitted on April 1, and the number of confirmed candidates it had registered with Elections Canada.
The Elections Canada deadline to submit nomination papers fell one week after the debates’ commission deadline.
In a statement, the commission said the party had appeared to have “deliberately” reduced its number of candidates for “strategic reasons.”
The party’s list of endorsed candidates included 340 names by the April 1 deadline, well above the commission’s criteria of a party having endorsed candidates in 90 per cent of the country’s 343 ridings. According to the court filing, on April 6, the party submitted a similar list to Elections Canada — one that had two extra names at 342.
Three days later, though, the party’s final list of confirmed candidates to Elections Canada only included 232 names.
The judicial review application claims Michel Cormier, the executive director of the Leaders’ Debates Commission, appears to have made the decision to exclude the party based on remarks from Green co-Leader Jonathan Pedneault reported by Radio-Canada and party spokesperson Rod Leggett in The Globe and Mail.
Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault is protesting being suddenly cut from the leaders’ debates after the party intentionally fell short of the required candidate count. The Greens say they pulled some candidates to block the Conservatives.
Cormier made the decision in the absence of a debates commissioner, a post that has gone unfilled since David Johnston resigned from the role in 2023. May said the absence of a commissioner, in her view, had made the application of the rules unclear to Cormier and anyone else in charge of applying them.
“It’s a strategic decision.… We decided not to send candidates in certain ridings, notably where Conservatives had more chances of winning than we do,” Pedneault was quoted as saying in French in the Radio-Canada article.
In an interview with CBC News the same day the Radio-Canada article was published, Pedneault said the party had removed 15 candidates for strategic reasons. He said the dozens of other candidates no longer in the running had pulled out due to struggles with obtaining enough signatures, and volunteers facing intimidation from constituents upset about the idea of splitting progressive votes.
“The commission solely relies on media reports containing statements made in a highly politicized context,” the application for judicial review filed Thursday said.
Greens ‘never’ removed candidates: May
May said the party does not operate as a “top-down” hierarchy and would not choose to remove candidates without candidates doing so themselves.
“We never made a decision to remove candidates strategically,” May said, adding this year’s election had been especially difficult for candidates to collect signatures, and that electoral officers had rejected several signatures for various reasons, such as smudged ink due to bad weather. She said the only election where the Green Party didn’t have a full slate of candidates since 2004 was in 2021, when the party was beset by internal governance struggles.
It also said that in phone conversations with the party’s campaign director Robin Marty, Cormier did not suggest Pedneault could be booted from the debates.
The commission later only gave Marty two-and-a-half hours to explain why the party had fewer candidates and that nowhere in the criteria did it say that number had to be the same past the April 1 deadline, the party argued.
The commission criteria “expressly provided that parties were not required to show that the party had successfully nominated candidates in 90 per cent of ridings,” the document said.
The application also says the decision failed to proportionately balance Charter protections for the party’s freedom of expression.
Though the debates themselves went smoothly, there were several hiccups before and after. Beyond the Pedneault exclusion, the commission was criticized for having admitted several far-right fringe media journalists, who monopolized questions in post-debate news conferences with the party leaders.
On the night of the second debate, those news conferences were cancelled due to security concerns related to the presence of those journalists.
