It sounds like the new rules apply to everyone, so the fact that they’re blameless and elderly has nothing to do with it. Harmless old ladies also have to go through security screening at the airport, believe it or not.
Stupid rules that apply to everyone are still stupid.
It’s remarkable enough to have made the CBC national news. The salient fact here is the marked change from previous border protocols, notably the photographing and fingerprinting. This is a real slap in the face to Canadian snowbirds who have been a sigificant part of Florida’s economy. No wonder tourism to the US is down so much!
In related news, Trump’s idiot ambassador to Canada is threatening to shut down US Customs and Immigration pre-clearance at Canadian airports on the grounds that passenger traffic to the US is way down!
Civic elections were held yesterday in Alberta and the results may not be know until the end of the week! This is because Premier Donald, sorry Danielle, Smith has deemed that electronic vote counting machines are a Socialist plot and may not be used. So, Alberta counts votes the same way that Ghana and Togo do. Welcome to the Third World.
But we’ve always counted ballots this way, at least in provincial and federal elections.
I’m 60% sure that I had a Scantron-type ballot for the 2025 Ontario provincial election. Am I misremembering?
EDIT: Now that I think of it, the computer-readable part is probably only for registering the ballot and giving a receipt, or something like that.
Saskatchewan uses Scantron-type ballots for municipal elections. Makes for faster and cheaper counting with the multi-race ballots (mayor, councilor, school board trustee, separate school board trustee) and fewer election volunteers as compared to provincial/federal elections. In the event of a particularly close race you can always go back and do a manual recount. Alberta used to do the same, no idea about other provinces. Apparently this is going to cost Alberta several million dollars for the additional labour.
Municipal elections are electronically tabulated in Toronto as well as some Provincial ridings. Federal is always hand counted..
Meh. I used to make a few dollars way back when, long before counting machines, when Toronto hand-counted ballots on municipal elections. Yep, I counted them. It can be done.
I did vote in our recent municipal election. (I’m in Lethbridge, Alberta.) What pissed me off was having to fill out a “voter registration form” and have its information compared to my driver’s license prior to getting my ballots. I never had to do that in a municipal election before. I’m already registered with the Feds and with the Province, no problem. Why does Premier Donald, er, I mean Danielle, feel the need to make voting so damn difficult?
When I worked the 2018 Ontario polls we had Electronic Poll books (“e-poll books” basically handheld tablets with specialized software) for verifying addresses/names/locations. Voters had a ballot that they filled and then fed into a Vote Tabulator which read and confirmed that the vote was cast while it saved the paper copy in a bank/lockbox.
The fastest clean-up and hassle free time at the end of the day. Unlike the Federal electron where we’d spend all-hours counting, recording, and publicly verifying ballots in every box, the Ontario election results were known and reported across the whole province before we even unloaded all the equipment back to our local ballot office.
Vote tabulators are awesome, from my logistical experience.
I’m a teacher. One could ask this question about a great many things she does. Why no limit on how many students in a classroom, for instance?
I’ve never understood the Conservative positions on education. Best I can come up with is that they think it should be as cheap as possible, so anything that might lead them to hire more teachers (who are all socialist bastards and gay groomers anyway) is automatically suspect. Danielle Smith, Scott Moe, Doug Ford - they can all just fuck right off as far as I’m concerned!
Well, THAT was a fun game! I have high hopes for the Blue Jays in this series!