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OTTAWA — Mike Taffarel can’t recall how many federal elections he has run in as a candidate in the northern Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie.

The retired steelworker first ran federally in 1979 when Joe Clark became prime minister, and then missed an election or two in between then and now.

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Taffarel has never won. Running for the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada doesn’t grab him a lot of votes.

Four years ago, the 63-year-old Taffarel received the fewest votes of any candidate in the 2011 federal election. Nonetheless, he’s back again.

“We don’t chase after individual votes,” he said. “Our job is to get our voice heard and to get people activated and motivated and thinking politically.”

Taffarel is one of 364 candidates from smaller parties who are hoping to make a dent at the ballot box on Monday. In the 2011 election, those parties fielded 285 candidates who received a total of 129,703 votes combined, or just under one per cent of the popular vote.

In 2011, 38 people cast their ballots for Taffarel — the fewest of any of the 1,587 candidates who ran for federal office, according to Elections Canada data.

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He got 0.1 per cent of the votes in Sault Ste. Marie. By comparison, the candidate who received the most votes in 2011 was Conservative Jason Kenney with 48,173, or 76.3 per cent. Stephen Harper received 42,998 votes, or 75.1 per cent of the vote in his riding.