A Canadian Wheat Board election campaign marked by confrontation,
heated rhetoric and angry words quietly came to an end last week.
As the Dec. 5 voting deadline passed by, the 22 candidates in the five
director elections could only sit and wait for the results to be
announced 10 days later.
“It’s going to be a nervous couple of weeks,” said Bill Nicholson,
seeking re-election in District 9.
The beginning of the election period coincided with the jailing in
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Lethbridge of 13 farmers who refused to pay fines arising from customs
violations for illegally exporting grain to the United States.
With that as its starting point, the campaign quickly evolved into a
rancorous and highly polarized debate over single desk selling,
involving not only candidates and voters, but also support groups, farm
organizations, politicians and national media commentators.
CWB chair Ken Ritter, who didn’t face re-election, said the public
debate seemed at times to be driven more by politics and personality
than by a rational discussion of issues and candidates’ qualifications.
“Often the debate was off on some tangent that had little or nothing to
do with what it takes to be a director,” he said. “It often seemed to
be more ideological than professional.”
But a number of candidates interviewed last week said the acrimonious
nature of the public campaign wasn’t reflected in their experience as
they met or talked to thousands of individual farmers.
“I think that all gets overblown,” said Nicholson. “It’s quite
different at the farm level.”
District 5 candidate Charles Baillargeon agreed, saying that of the
more than 1,300 voters he personally spoke to during the campaign,
representing a wide spectrum of political positions, only two were rude
or confrontational.
“I think that when two people sit down across the table from each other
or on the phone and simply talk about the issues, you get a lot more
accomplished than splashing headlines across the media and inflaming
things and getting people all fired up,” he said.
Dwayne Anderson, who ran in District 7, said the vast majority of
farmers have a lot more in common than gets reflected in the public
debate and media coverage.
“There is the radical left and the radical right, but neither one of
those has high numbers of people,” he said.
But once an election campaign starts, interest groups get involved,
battle lines are drawn and the farm community becomes polarized.
“The No. 1 issue that everyone asks you is whether you support the
single desk policy or not,” said Doug Vreeling, who ran as single desk
supporter in District 1. “You can have lots of other good ideas, but it
comes down to that.”
Several candidates said the campaign wasn’t so much about convincing
farmers to change their views on the single desk issue as it was about
getting their supporters to vote.
“I think most minds were pretty much made up,” said Anderson.
All five of the directorships up for grabs in the election were held by
incumbents who supported the board’s single desk marketing status. Four
of the other five farmer directors are also single desk supporters.
Candidates and organizers from both sides were reluctant to predict the
results, but did say they encountered lots of support for their
position.
“Maybe people just tell you what you want to hear when you talk to
them,” Anderson said with a laugh.
No matter what the outcome of the election, it won’t result in any
immediate change in the board’s marketing powers. That can only be done
by Parliament following a plebiscite of producers following a request
from the board of directors to the federal minister responsible for the
CWB.
Anderson, who campaigned for an end to the single desk system, said
he’s well aware that things aren’t going to change overnight.
“This system has been created over a number of years and it’s going to
take a number of years to change it.”
Art Macklin, a single desk supporter seeking re-election in District 1,
said that while it’s true the directors don’t have the authority to
change the board’s marketing mandate, having a number of directors who
want to dismantle the single desk could cause real problems.
“It could make for a very dysfunctional board of directors and could
undermine the efficient operations of the corporation,” he said. “You
just couldn’t function if you had too many of those folks on the board.”
Alanna Koch, chair of CARE, an organization that supported open market
candidates, said regardless of the outcome, their campaign has been a
success.
“We’ve been very encouraged by the momentum, we’ve felt,” she said. “At
the end of the day we feel we’ve definitely gained ground.”
