Amazing Milestones!

As 2024 draws to a close, we're so grateful for all the support we've received over the past year. Thanks to all of our wonderful supporters, we were able to prepare and present our appeal in the Charter Challenge for Fair Voting at the Court of Appeal for Ontario last month, and just a couple of days ago we closed out our fundraising round to support preparing a "leave to appeal" application to the Supreme Court of Canada that we expect to submit sometime in late spring or early summer of 2025 (special thanks to a generous contributor who topped up donations over the past month by 25%!).

From November 5, 2024:

Today was our big day - we presented our appeal in the Court of Appeal for Ontario in front of a panel of three judges - Justices Grant Huscroft, Jonathan Dawe, and Gary Trotter. If you'd like see a play-by-play commentary of what went down, check out our tweets here.

From October 13, 2024:

A Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! We are deeply thankful for all the support you have shown us over the past few years, and especially now that there's only a little over three weeks left until we present our appeal arguments in front of the Court of Appeal for Ontario!

Update on Interveners

In our last message, we told you about the six organizations that submitted "intervener" arguments in the Charter Challenge - these were:

• Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights

• Women's Legal Action and Education Fund

• Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg

• Fair Vote Canada

• South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario

• Canadian Constitution Foundation

All these submissions are available on our website. We subsequently submitted our response to the interveners (mainly arguing against the CCF's argument that FPTP is somehow "constitutionalized").

Filings by Attorney General

Most recently, the Attorney General submitted both their response to the interveners, as well as their own appeal factum - essentially the argument they're going to make against our appeal case. Both these submissions are also now available on our website.

Next Steps - Prepping Our Oral Arguments

Between now and our court appearance (currently scheduled for November 5th and 6th), Nicolas will be working hard on preparing our oral arguments that we'll present in court. Over the next few weeks, we'll provide some more details on what we're planning to argue (in some previous messages, we've describes some of the arguments from our own factum - more to come!).

From September 24, 2024:

We're delighted to let you know that a remarkable 13 organizations applied to be interveners in the Charter Challenge (up from 4 in our first hearing, which shows how much interest the challenge is generating), and the court invited six of them to submit full arguments (which you can read in detail on our website).

What are "Interveners"?

Interveners are known as "friends of the court" - their job is to "advance different and valuable insights and perspectives [from those of the parties in the case] that will ... further the Court’s determination of the matter."

Over the past month or so, we've shared with you what the judge made of the evidence we presented in the Charter Challenge and laid out various objections we have related to his findings.

Starting today, we shift our attention to the legal arguments that we've made, and start discussing the various ways we feel that the judge "fell into error" in considering our case so that you'll have a better sense of what we're hoping to prove when we appear at the appeal in November.

From Aug 10: In our last few messages, we've been sharing with you the key findings the judge made in our first hearing about how First-Past-the-Post (FPTP). Today, we present the last main group of findings - how FPTP discriminates against minority groups.

From Aug 5: In our last message, we shared with you the key findings from our first hearing about how First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) leads to under-representation of women, which is a core part of our argument that FPTP violates our Section 15 right to equality.

In our last few messages, we've been sharing with you the key "findings of fact" that the judge made in our original challenge last fall. We've previously covered those that relate to reduced effectiveness of representation and impaired participation. Today, we outline the judge's findings related to under-representing women, which is a core part of our argument that First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) violates our Section 15 right to equality.

From July 14, 2024:

In last week's email, we shared with you the key "findings of fact" that the judge made in our original challenge last fall that support our claim that our current First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system provides poor legislative representation to many voters - the core of our "Section 3" argument. Our key point is that many voters (now routinely more than half) don't have "effective representation" because they have not voted for the MP in their riding, and "their" MP actively works against their political interests.

This week, we review the judge's second main set of findings - that FPTP impairs many voters' right to meaningful participation (a second key component of our Section 3 "right to vote").

From July 8, 2024:

When we appeared in the Superior Court of Ontario last September to present our Charter Challenge for Fair Voting, we presented hundreds of pages of affidavits and other written evidence.

One of the most important tasks for the judge in this first hearing was to make "findings of fact" - i.e., to decide what facts were established by the evidence and should therefore be relied on in deciding the legal issues in our case.

This step is especially important because, with few exceptions, these findings can't be easily challenged or re-litigated on appeal. Today, then, we'll share with you some of the key findings, as summarized by our lawyer (Nicolas Rouleau) in our appeal factum.