It will have to go to court at this point but EC has done nothing wrong in terms of the recount.

Agreed. This isn't the step where the EC did wrong - it was earlier in putting the wrong postal code on the envelope that caused it to be returned.

You make it sound like a conspiracy that they counted more votes for the Liberals.

Not the OP but - I'd agree that this is definitely not the case. It seems to instead be a clear and accidental mistake on the part of whoever handled the printing of the envelope.

Now, while it's definitely troubling if the overall vote can be swung by an "administrative error" of some sort, there's no evidence that this happened more than in this one case. And thus it only matters because the final call was done to having a single vote more for the Liberal candidate.

If it was down to even just two votes for the Liberal candidate instead, getting this lost vote counted would not have changed the results. So definitely not a conspiracy.

They’re doing everything by the book.

I guess the point here is - laws can be changed. Perhaps not retroactively this specific case, but going forward the laws can be updated to better handle situations like this in the future where EC made a mistake.

This is a totally different situation, but when I went to exchange my expired driver's license at Service Ontario, one of the first workers that I saw there made a mistake and incorrectly refused my abstract.

I had to return after a weekend, and spoke with someone else who acknowledged the issue. At this point I was technically outside the 1-year window by a couple of days to be able to perform the exchange - but I wouldn't have been if not for their mistake. Luckily for me, they were empowered to correct it and accept the exchange.

So - is there a compelling reason to avoid granting EC the ability to correct their own mistakes, particularly in a clear-cut situation like this one?

They never saw the vote. They can't count it, it has to go to court. They're following the law.

Then make an application to a judge to challenge the result and they will have to count it.

Truly, it should be the BQ that does it. I'm guessing they will in the coming days.