Elections Canada says Terrebonne vote is final, despite ‘error’ with special ballot

OTTAWA — Elections Canada says the result of a recount in the federal riding of Terrebonne is final, despite a misprint that led to one special ballot being returned to sender.

Elections Canada says there was an error on the envelope used to mail a special ballot from Terrebonne, a Quebec riding the Liberals won by a single vote after a recount.

Preliminary results indicated that the Liberals had won the riding, but the seat flipped temporarily to the Bloc Québécois after the results were validated.

After a recount that gave the seat back to the Liberals, however, CBC News reported that a Bloc voter saw her mail-in ballot returned to her.

The agency says an analysis confirmed that part of the return address on the envelope destined for a local Elections Canada office – the last three characters of the postal code – was incorrect.

Despite the error and questions about the possibility of another recount or a byelection, Elections Canada spokesperson Matthew McKenna said “the result of the recount is final.”

“The Canada Elections Act does not explicitly provide for the appeal of a judicial recount and Elections Canada is unaware of any appeals brought to a court following a recount,” said McKenna.

Elections Canada said this is only case they know of in the recent election of an envelope containing a marked ballot being returned to a voter because of an incorrect address.

McKenna said the returned vote was never part of the recount.

“Any vote that doesn’t get to us on time to wherever it’s meant to go, whether it’s the local office or to our counting facility in Ottawa, the law basically dictates that it can’t be counted,” he said. “So even if it’s something that happens as a result of an error on our part, there’s really no mechanism for that to be counted.”

McKenna said the only thing that could lead to a change in the result is someone officially contesting it.

“Anyone can make an application to a judge to say that they want the results of the election to be reviewed,” he said. “There’s a possibility that that happens … as far as I’m aware, nobody’s put forward such an application yet.”

Liberal Tatiana Auguste was initially projected to win the riding by 35 votes after the April 28 election, but on May 1, following the required postelection validation process, Bloc Québécois candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné, who was first elected in 2021, moved ahead by 44 votes.

The win was returned to Auguste following the judicial recount, with Auguste receiving 23,352 votes and Sinclair-Desgagné receiving 23,351.

A judicial recount is automatic when the number of votes cast for the candidate with the most votes and the number of votes cast for any other candidate is less than 0.1 per cent of the valid votes cast.

A validation process is done by the returning officer, who reviews the cumulative addition of votes in a riding from every poll, based on the counts determined at every polling station in the presence of party scrutineers and election officers. It does not recount the ballots, or review ballots that were deemed to be invalid.

A judicial recount looks at all the ballots again, verifying the ones that were initially accepted and reconsidering ballots that were rejected. It takes place in the presence of a judge from a Superior Court in the affected province or territory.

Sinclair-Desgagné wrote on Facebook Monday that she owed it to herself to “evaluate all the options before us.”

The final result brought the Liberals to 170 seats in the House of Commons, two shy of the 172 needed for a majority government. The Bloc seat count fell to 22.

Other judicial recounts are ongoing in the ridings of Windsor–Tecumseh–Lakeshore, Milton East–Halton Hills South and Terra Nova–The Peninsulas.

— With files from Cassidy McMackon and Morgan Lowrie

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 14, 2025.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press