Quebec Green Party candidate wins right to vote in court

MONTREAL – A lawsuit seeking to put five McGill University students on the list of electors has for the most part failed, with only one eligible to register to vote in the upcoming election.

“I’m terribly upset that my co-plaintiffs are going to be unable to vote,” said Quebec Green Party candidate Brendan Edge, the one successful plaintiff.

“I think that is a miscarriage of justice.”

Watch: Students in court for right to vote

Judge Robert Mongeon ruled that Edge should be added to the voter rolls, but he said that the four other plaintiffs did not meet the necessary criteria to establish domicile in the province.

Two of them, Matthew Lucas Satterthwaite and James Hallifax, had continued to use out-of-province health cards and driver’s licences while they were claiming domicile in Quebec, the judge noted.

The other two students, Arielle Vaniderstein and Simren Sandhu, had reached the age of majority less than six months before the election was called.

Attorney Julius Grey, who was representing the five students, said he wasn’t sure if he would appeal, but added that the case would likely be revisited in the future. He also said that Quebec’s voter laws would likely be “clarified” further as a result of the case.

Mongeon spent the better part of an hour-and-a-half parsing complex legal theories surrounding the concept of “domicile,” which had suddenly become a focal point as anglophone and allophone students in the province started coming forward alleging they were arbitrarily being kept of the voter rolls.

READ MORE: Quebec student: ‘Classic voter suppression tactic is going on’

“To be domiciled, one must have a residence, but the reverse is not necessarily the case,” the judge said at one point during the hearing.

He added that a potential voter establishing an address is easy and objective to document, while the same person proving intentions in the province, a crucial component in establishing domicile, is a subjective process.

“The central question here is: does a student who comes from Ontario to study in Quebec come here temporarily?” he asked rhetorically, suggesting that as Quebec’s election law is currently written, “you cannot escape that question.”

The lawsuit includes allegations which, if true, reveal that the criteria used by the Director General of Elections are extremely arbitrary.

READ MORE: No irregular activity or vote stealing says Quebec’s Chief Electoral Officer

Vaniderstein, for example, alleged in the complaint that she went to her polling station in the downtown riding of Westmount-St-Louis with Hallifax.

Election officials had put her on the rolls but denied Hallifax’s attempt to register, causing her to argue for her right to vote on the basis that the two students each possessed the same documents.

The next day, she alleged that an elections worker contacted her by telephone to say that her name had been removed from the list of electors.

Edge’s case seemed much more straightforward in the judge’s mind.

“One doesn’t understand how someone can be a candidate on one hand, and not be allowed to vote on the other,” Mongeon said.

The young man is currently a candidate running under the banner of the Green Party in Chomedey.

The fact that he had managed to run for office while being told he was ineligible to vote is something that flummoxed many.

Watch: Quebec Green Party candidate can’t vote

Grey echoed the judge’s dismay over the discrepancies in the electoral office’s decision not to let Edge vote.

“You cannot give contradictory decisions,” he said.