English-speaking students file injunction after being blocked from voting in Quebec election

With the Quebec election just days away, electoral officials are facing accusations of “voter suppression” from university student groups, allegations of bias and, now, a legal challenge from five English-speaking university students who claim they were arbitrarily blocked from signing up to vote.

The deadline to register to participate in the April 7 election is Thursday, but the province still faces an issue that weighs heavier than a handful of Quebec students who launched legal action after being told they could not register to vote. The issue could be more than a few random incidents.

Five McGill University students filed an injunction on Tuesday in a bid to get onto the Quebec voters' list. The Globe and Mail reports that human-rights lawyer Julius Grey will lead the legal challenge, which argues they were "turned down by election officials in 'arbitrary decisions' that violate their fundamental rights."

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All five have lived in other provinces, but have been residents in Quebec for more than six months and say in sworn affidavits they intend to stay in Quebec for at least three years.

That goes well beyond Quebec's voter eligibility requirements, which requires Canadian voters be “domiciled” in Quebec for six months before the election. It turns out the “domicile” is a fluid term that can be interpreted on a case-by-case basis.

Various documents could be requested to prove that the would-be voter was appropriately domiciled, but that hasn’t seemed to matter in many cases.

The five students involved in the injunction all lived outside of Quebec before registering at McGill. Brendan Edge is actually a registered candidate in the election – running for the Green Party in a Laval riding – but has still been told he is not allowed to vote.

Simren Sandhu, originally from British Columbia, told the Globe he was blocked from registering before he had a chance to show all of his documentation to officials. Another student told the newspaper he was rejected because the official felt "his roots were too strong" in Ontario.

Here is another student, who wrote on the Huffington Post that extensive research and preparation were not enough to convince an official he was “domiciled” in the province.

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Yet another student was actually born in Quebec, but had lived out of the province before returning to attend McGill two years ago.

Matthew Satterthwaite told the Montreal Gazette he spoke on the phone, in French, to an election official to confirm his Quebec birth certificate, Canadian passport and Montreal apartment lease would be sufficient evidence to be registered.

When he arrived to register he spoke English. And was rejected.

“I wanted to prove a point, because I don’t think it’s fair that anglophone students are being turned away, when francophone students are able to vote with the same documentation,” he told the newspaper.

But the issue does not, by any means, end at a handful of students. The Students' Society of McGill University says it learned from one election official that officials at one station rejected at least 27 students in one day. Another student reported seeing three people be rejected in one 30-minute period.

Key issues up for debate in the Quebec election appear to speak to both students and English-speaking residents of Quebec. With the question of the province’s separation from Canada at the centre of the debate, as well as a controversial religious accommodation law and the governing Parti Quebecois’ war against the English language, it would seem that outrage-motivated voting by an educated, highly-English subset of university students – mixed with already lagging polling numbers – would be bad news for the Parti Quebecois.

A statements released by the Students' Society of McGill University and co-signed by the Concordia University student union, denounced what they called "voter suppression and intimidation."

The student groups said, "Students who are legally eligible to vote and who have provided more than adequate documentation are being turned away and harassed by election officials."

"The provincial election campaign has been marked by a politics of fear and division, used to falsely present Quebec as under threat by non-Quebeckers– specifically scapegoating Muslim communities, and now, out-of-province students."

The Students' Socierty of McGill University stated finally:

Indeed, the idea of using students as scapegoats has already leaked into the actual campaign.

The Parti Quebecois has claimed that university students from Ontario were trying to disrupt the election by sneaking onto the voter list.

One Montreal election official resigned after publicly sneering that anyone who arrived at the Montreal airport was being given free visas. And MNA Leo Bureau-Blouin claimed out-of-province students were going to "steal the election."

Those are strong words. Though with voter registration set to close on Thursday and still countless complaints that various Quebec residents are being blocked from exercising their democratic right, perhaps those words are not entirely out of place.

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