Every now and then I read something so transparently stupid, bad faith, or plainly offensive to my sensibilities that I stop, and audibly say “What the actual fuck?” 

Considering the nature of my job, this tends to happen a lot, though it is noteworthy that twice this summer it’s been because of something said by none other than Dr. Leo Groarke.

In June, it was because the former Trent University President and Vice-Chancellor chose to weigh in months after the fact of the “Mayor says the N-word” scandal in a Peterborough Examiner op-ed about how we need to be more understanding about Jeff Leal casually dropping a racial slur in a university lecture, because he didn’t really mean it. 

This week, the source of my consternation comes from comments in Groarke’s most recent Examiner column, “The peculiar logic of the longest ballot,” where the philosophy professor somehow segues his apparent annoyance at the Longest Ballot Committee into the mother of all bad takes, saying that the longest ballot is “a clear instance of electoral abuse,” and then implicitly comparing its seriousness to that sexual abuse and intimiate partner violence.

Woof.

Let’s back up. What is the Longest Ballot Committee, and why does Groarke take issue with it? Why, in turn, do I take issue with the way he takes issue with it?

The committee is an activist group, at one time affiliated with the federal Rhinoceros Party, which aims to flood ballots with candidates in targeted ridings during federal elections and by-elections in protest of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system of voting in Canadian federal elections.

During the 2025 federal election, the initiative helped register 85 candidates in Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s former riding of Carleton, which he lost by a significant margin. After Poilievre announced his intentions to run in a forced by-election in a Conservative stronghold riding like the sore loser political failson of the Harper dynasty he is, the Longest Ballot Committee responded in kind by helping more than 200 candidates register for the by-election in Battle River—Crowfoot.

This by-election Poilievre handily won—though not without much public complaining about his having to run against 213 legally registered candidates; complaining that Groarke was kind enough to parrot in his Examiner column in quoting Poilievre’s opinion that the initiative is intended “to confuse the situation, to make it harder for people to vote.”

To his credit, Groarke does quote fellow Battle River—Crowfoot candidates Bonnie Critchley and Michael Harris, both against the initiative. Critchley, on CTV, almost called the Longest Ballot Committee “illegal [election interference],” before catching herself and clarifying that the movement is in fact wholly law-abiding. She does, however, still claim it’s “election interference.”

Harris’ comment, that the Longest Ballot Committee is “a co-ordinated mockery of the democratic process,” is even funnier to me considering that Harris ran as a Libertarian. Truly the jokes write themselves.

However, the only person in support of the initiative whom Groarke quotes is Largest Ballet Spokesperson Tomas Szuchewycz, who he then proceeds to relentlessly strawman. Groarke cherry-picks quotes Szuchewycz made earlier during the Carleton campaign, which he called “one-of-a-kind” and “has been a whole lot of fun,” to create the impression that Szuchewycz is an unserious buffoon being completely blasé about what Groarke calls “a clear instance of electoral abuse.”

It’s a transparently bad-faith framing that neglects to even try and understand why anyone would want to participate in this initiative. As it turns out, some people have pretty good reasons!

In the lead-up to the Alberta by-election CBC’s Power & Politics spoke to Longest Ballot participant Mark Moutter, who explained that the initiative advocates for electoral reform. “The previous Liberal government under Justin Trudeau promised us electoral reform and backtracked,” Moutter told CBC, saying that politicians have no motivation to change the FPTP system as it’s the one which elected them in the first place.

Another candidate, Jayson Cowan, told CBC the initiative provided him a unique opportunity to get on the ballot as an independent, something he’d previously struggled to do on account of his mobility issues. 

"This is no protest for me. It's the real deal. And they're just offering a beautiful, fantastic democratic service," Cowan is quoted in a CBC article.

Of course, these are the types of voices Groarke omits from his account of the initiative, stacking evidence in his favour to service the preposterous narrative that the Longest Ballot Committee represents something akin to an existential threat to democracy, only dredging up sympathetic testimony just to dismiss it out of hand. 

It’s poor, disingenuous philosophy, and even poorer reporting. 

Then again, Groarke isn’t a reporter. He’s just a guy with a column and a keyboard.

Which brings us to my raison d’être for writing this. In railing agains the Longest Ballot, Groarke goes a step beyond Critchley and calls the initiative not just electoral interference, but abuse. 

He goes on to say that Szuchewycz’s assertion that politicians should recuse themselves from discussing electoral rules because “there is a clear and inappropriate conflict of interest” for those actively trying to get elected “strangely suggests that victims of abuse—who always have something to gain from an attempt to correct abuses—should recuse themselves from efforts to eliminate it.”

“We would not accept this principle in the case of domestic abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse or sexual abuse,” the doctor of philosophy says. “We should not accept it in the case of electoral abuse.”

Reader, this is what prompted me to say “What the actual fuck.”

There’s a couple reasons reading this makes me very angry. One is the simple knee-jerk reaction of seeing this transparently false equivalency and immediately recognizing that, “Hey, those aren’t the same thing at all!”

Each of the examples Groarke lists are interpersonal abuses, in most cases between two parties wherein the victim is an actual human person and not the abstract concept of “fair process” or democracy itself.

As a pedant of his calibre, Groarke should know that meaning of words is mutable, and “abuse” as it can be rhetorically (some might say dogmatically) used to describe meddling in the democratic process is similar to its use in describing interpersonal abuse, but by no means congruent.

I mean, wasn’t that literally his argument when he said we should all just ignore the mayor saying the N-word? That the context of that use differed from using it in an expressly racist way? It strikes me as a strange sort of inconsistency from a man who seems to pride himself on owning the Peterborough reading public with facts and logic.

Another reason this passage immediately elicits anger from me is the way in which Groarke explicitly equates electoral interference with these sorts of interpersonal abuses.

I am a woman. In my lifetime I’ve experienced sexual, emotional, and domestic abuse. In no world would I call these remotely equivalent kinds of experiences.

I’m sorry, but this is to me the supreme example of a #ManMoment. It takes a certain type of naïvete possessed largely by cis males of a certain age and income bracket to equate democracy, the ideal, with the lived experience of 44% of the female population. 

It’s tactless, and a poor equivalency, doubly so when Poilievre, the chief “victim” of said supposed “abuse” is a man who has built a large part of his political career on flirting with misogyny in his use of misogynistic hashtags on YouTube videos, frequent references to women’s roles as homemakers and their “biological clocks,” public threats to introduce legislative attacks on the rights of trans women, and refusal to commit to saying that Conservative MPs would not be permitted to introduce legislation to regulate or repeal access to abortion—despite his assertion that he would not personally do so.

2 out of 3 women in Canada hold a negative opinion of Poilievre according to an Angus Reid Institute survey, but by all means, implore me to feel sorry that he had to put in some extra legwork to fail back into the House of Commons.

It’s not exactly that I’m surprised by Groarke’s comments—he is a man of a certain age, after all—though I do feel some degree of disgust at the idea that this is a man whose hand I shook at my convocation, who implored us to think critically in his speech (in those moments when he wasn’t talking about himself) who also seems incapable of exercising any iota of self-awareness when writing for a public forum himself.

However, even if you take them at their own face value, Groarke’s arguments fall flat. The professor says “The more serious conflict of interest in the Longest Ballot case is that of the committee, which says it is pursuing electoral reform.”

The issue Groarke seems to take with that specifically is that by advocating for electoral reform, “What [the Longest Ballot Committee] means is electoral reform in keeping with its own view of it.”

“Szuchewycz did not earn a seat in the House of Commons when he ran in the 2021 federal election (he received 14 votes). Having failed there, he and his colleagues seem intent on achieving what they want with an end run around of the electoral process,” Groarke claims.

Which is just transparently wrong. First of all, how running in an election abiding by all regulations and due processes constitutes “an end run around of the electoral process” is beyond me. That’s a self-evidently weak claim to make.

Further, had Groarke bothered to watch any of the interviews with Mark Moutter which I mentioned, he’d have caught the part where Moutter says “there’s a lot of different views in the [Longest Ballot Committee,” and that while he might personally believe in a ranked ballot system or proportional representation, he “always like[s] saying it’s a very decentralized group of people.”

The cabal of electoral abusers which Groarke has conjured in his mind’s eye is simply not the reality of who the people participating in the Longest Ballot initiative are. In his attempt to disavow the initiative, Groarke has failed from first principles to even properly explain the thing he opposes in his rebuttal to it.

This is lazy, poor-faith debating, unbefitting of a man whose byline prominently qualifies him as a professor of philosophy. I would be embarrassed to publish this. Not just had I written this, but equally as an editor were this to have crossed my desk.

Why the Examiner publishes things like this is somewhat beyond me, but hey—it’s their opinion section!

What strikes me most about Groarke’s column is his lack of curiosity. His dismissal of the Longest Ballot, and seemingly of election reform, is quick and dispassionate. Can he truly not fathom why people would have lost faith in the first-past-the-post system?

Democracy, in its conception, was founded on the belief of collective participation of the populace. In Greek it literally means “people’s rule.” Sure, elections are the traditional method of enshrining the population with the power of representation, but then the principal motivation of activists like those of the Longest Ballot Committee is that our current way of executing those elections fails to do exactly that.

First-past-the-post is flawed at representing anything close to resembling the general will of the Canadian population, prone to producing governments with large disparities between seat counts and an actual percentage of the popular vote.

It’s arguably the reason the NDP lost official party status in 2025, securing 7 seats, or 2% of the house, despite receiving 6% of the popular vote.

These are the sorts of problems that the measures advocated for by those in the Longest Ballot Committee would address, and the only expressions of self-interest I can see in their initiative is that they want representation to be reflective of the will of the people, and not that of the politicians whose pensions depend on their gaming the system (as Poliievre has in this by-election) for indefinite re-election. 

Despite Poilievre’s claims that initiatives like the Longest Ballot erode trust in democracy, it’s the very kind of political careerism and machination in which he is engaged—and to which my generation has borne witness—which has inspired such disillusion in the ability of the electoral system to meaningfully represent Canadians. The de facto two-party dynasty shared by the Conservatives and Liberals and the transparent gaming of by-elections to let leaders maintain their seats are testament to a failed system, but it seems that Groarke is unable to see that. 

In his conclusion, Groarke says that “anyone who wants electoral form [sic] of whatever sort should campaign for it.” Ignoring the fact that that seems the very thing the Longest Ballot Initiative is trying to do, Groarke’s examples of #FirstPastthePostWins thoroughly depress me.

“In 1918, an all-male Parliament passed a law giving women the vote,” Groarke writes. “In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights radically changed the way that governing works.”

In essence, the view he seems to take is that of Neoliberal optimism—leave the systems to their devices and eventually these structures of social repression may work in your favour. Give parliament a couple decades and those preventing you from full participation in society might eventually deign to give you rights!

This is the view of a man who has never had reason to question the efficacy of these systems. Why would he? White men have always had it made. They’re not the ones whose lives Poilievre’s shameless gimmering of first-past-the-post threatens to complicate when parliament reconvenes.

Groarke’s vision of political fairness is one in which politeness and tradition supersede equity, in which what is most charitably a minor inconvenience represents a monumental transgression of due process equivalent, per his rhetoric, to domestic abuse and rape. A less restrained writer would probably have used those exact words—”the rape of democracy”—though I suppose I should give Groarke credit for not stooping that far.