An admittedly embarrassed federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl has delayed the barley marketing plebiscite by a week after a last-minute discovery that instructions to farmers on vote eligibility were flawed.
It will cost the federal government about $12,000 to reprint the instructions and delay the mailout until Feb. 7.
Eligible farmers will have until March 13 to mail their ballots back.
Strahl told reporters on Parliament Hill Feb. 1 that he was partly to blame for the delay in the planned Jan. 31 mailout. He thought his work on the issue was done when he set the three-part question and established the voting criterion to require the farmer to have grown grain last year and to have grown barley at least once in the past five years.
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“I thought I was done,” he said.
“In retrospect, I should have said I want to sign off on the actual ballot but I never saw it coming.”
On Jan. 30, the evening before the voting package was to be sent out, Strahl’s chief-of-staff discovered that the voting criterion had been misstated.
If a farmer did not include details about barley acreage and tonnage in each of the past five years, the ballot would be invalid.
A flurry of e-mails to election co-ordinator KPMG LLP stopped the mailouts.
“It was never my intention to do that (include the barley acreage tonnage information),” said Strahl. “If we’d done that, you would have been down to your accountant’s office to fill this out instead of doing it on the kitchen table. I feel embarrassed by it but there was nothing else to do. You can’t ask a farmer to go to his accountant’s office to fill out a plebiscite question.”
Strahl said if the ballot had gone out as printed, many farmers would have refused to comply.
“I regret the delay, but better that than having ballots that no one would fill out because I’m convinced farmers would just trash them,” he said.
Strahl said all farmers should receive their ballot by Feb. 15. If not, they can call 888-322-7539 to order one.
Meanwhile, the opposition majority on the House of Commons agriculture committee will try to force a vote on a motion this week that would call on the government to withdraw the ballots and to change the questions.
A motion from Liberal Wayne Easter states there should be two questions: do you favour retention of the Canadian Wheat Board single desk or do you prefer the open market?
Easter said last week the second of the three questions announced by Strahl – “I would like the option to market my barley to the CWB or any other domestic or foreign buyer” – should be withdrawn because it implies a “dual market” is a viable option when it is not.
