If it wasn’t official, it certainly is now. The Canadian Pirate Party will not be participating in this years Canadian election.
The day after the election, we noted that the Canadian Pirate Party was pretty much absent. The Twitter feed and Facebook feeds were largely dormant and the website was offline.
Today, we decided to check in on what they are up to. The official website is still offline. We then checked in on the official Twitter feed @piratepartyca. Now, it looks like there is some activity with a couple tweets and a few retweets. After that, we checked the official Facebook page and that account appears to still be dormant.
So, we looked at the status of the part according to Elections Canada. Officially speaking, the party is still de-registered as of 2017-11-30.
so, we did some digging around to see what are the rules about running. Is there a deadline to have candidates run? According to Elections Canada, a party has until 21 days before election day to have candidates running:
You must submit either a Nomination Paper (EC 20010) (paper copy filed at the returning officer’s office) or an online nomination form (filed on the Political Entities Service Centre portal) along with all required supporting documents. The filing deadline is 21 days before election day at 2:00 p.m. local time.
So, the question then becomes, when is election day in Canada? According to Wikipedia, election day is October 21st. So, with the party not even being registered, it looks like it’s official that the party will miss it’s first ever election since it was formed in 2010.
What is unfortunate about all of this is that this does look like a party that had a lot of momentum in years past suddenly hit a roadblock. This is definitely a very different picture then when I first started reporting on the party’s progress.
Previously, we were seeing a party that was doing things like offering VPN services to Canadians to protect Canadians from a Conservative majority in 2011. They were also challenging the Green Party on tech policies. So, they were presenting a political threat to the Green Party at one point even. At the time, I was observing a budding young party tearing it up and taking names. It really looked like this party would not only take Canada by storm, but even rise to the point of electing a candidate or two at some point in the near future. It was all about things looking up for the Canadian Pirate Party.
Now, in this election, we are left with the question of “what happened?” The party gets de-registered by Elections Canada in 2017, the party did vow that they will get back to an official status again. The official website goes offline and various feeds go dormant (now with the exception of Twitter as there appears to be activity now). This is a party that prides itself on know-how on digital issues, so while it may not be the end of the world for some parties, that is a bit cringe worthy for a party like this.
So, the question now is what the future has in store for the party. We asked whether or not the Canadian Pirate Party will appear in the next election since it seems that this one is basically a write off for the party. We asked on Twitter because that’s the only source we saw any recent activity, so that is the best chance that they might see our message. We’ll update you if we hear back from them.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
