When New Brunswickers vote in municipal elections this month, they might see some rather informal names on the ballots.
And they go beyond a Stephen using “Steve,” or a Christopher going by “Chris.”
“We have a Paddy, and there’s also a potatoes, en francais, we have a Governor, and there’s The Coach and a Smoothy,” Paul Harpelle, a spokesperson for Elections New Brunswick, said as he cited examples from the May 11 ballots.
Ballot names are allowed to be more eye-catching in New Brunswick, which has less strict rules about the practice than some other provinces.
Harpelle said current rules for both provincial and municipal elections don’t allow honorific titles to be used as part of someone’s official ballot name.
“But nicknames are aplenty,” he said.
Michael (Bauble) Plourde, who’s running for a council seat in Edmundston, said the nickname comes from his childhood.
“When I was about 12 or 13 years old, there was a show on French TV called Épopée rock,” Plourde said. “And there was a character by the name of Bouboule who people thought looked somewhat like me.”
Candidate Michael Plourde of Edmundston says Bauble has been his nickname since childhood. (Michael Plourde/Facebook)
One day an anglophone student tried to say that Plourde looked like the character, but mispronounced it as Bauble, he said.
“And the whole class started laughing, and they started calling me that,
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