Bloc Québécois to challenge Terrebonne election result in court
Posted May 15, 2025 9:43 am.
Last Updated May 15, 2025 1:04 pm.
The Bloc Québécois will launch a legal challenge of the controversial election result in the federal riding of Terrebonne.
Speaking in Ottawa Thursday morning, Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet said his party intends to contest the result.
“There may be wrongdoing without the intention of performing wrongdoing,” Blanchet said.
The Liberals’ Tatiana Auguste initially won the riding but it flipped to the Bloc’s Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné after the results were validated. A judicial recount later concluded the Liberals had won the riding by a single vote.
“It’s a roller-coaster,” said Sinclair-Desgagné. “Nevertheless, I’m lucky to be well surrounded, not only by my party but also by my peers, and a population that supports me is very confident in our case as well.”
Elections Canada declared the result final on Wednesday, but it admits a misprint on an envelope used to mail a special ballot from Terrebonne led to one Bloc voter’s mail-in ballot being returned to her.
“The error was in the last three characters of the postal code of this office’s address,” an Elections Canada spokesperson told CityNews Thursday. “To date, only one case has come to our attention where an envelope containing a marked ballot was returned to a voter because of an incorrect address.”
Despite the error, Elections Canada spokesperson Matthew McKenna said Wednesday “the result of the recount is final.”
Elections Canada explained that the Elections Act does not explicitly provide for the appeal of a judicial recount and that it is not aware of any appeals filed before a court following such an operation.
According to the agency, only a formal challenge could result in a change in the result, and that is precisely what the Bloc is doing.
“Elections Canada does not have the jurisdiction to order a do-over of the election, but they have admitted the error mentioned by the citizen,” Blanchet told reporters. “In light of this, we will obviously initiate proceedings to ask the court to order a new vote in the Terrebonne riding.”
Other mistakes
Elections Canada also revealed Thursday that it had received five late ballots with incorrect postal codes on the return envelope.
“There is no information to indicate whether the delay was related to the incorrect postal code. We note that the voters signed the declaration late in the election period,” wrote a spokesperson for the agency in an unsigned email.
In addition, 16 other ballots were never received, including that of the voter who first reported the situation. “The others could be due to a number of reasons (the voter forgot, decided not to vote, lost the ballot, etc.),” the agency added.
All other ballots were either received — and Elections Canada does not know if there was an addressing error — or the voters ultimately decided against voting by mail and chose to vote in person.
