CALGARY – Olev Wain figured he had proof positive that traditional government-farmer consultations do not work.
It happened in November, 1993 when newly-named agriculture minister Ralph Goodale used one of his first speeches to tell Saskatchewan Wheat Pool delegates a plebiscite on Canadian Wheat Board powers was not needed.
“The majority opinion I have heard from producers in my own constituency and elsewhere in the Prairies is in favor of the wheat board’s jurisdiction,” Goodale said.
Wain, a principal with Calgary-based market research firm The Dunvegan Group, believed he knew better.
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He had just finished polling the firm’s Prairie-wide Farm Advisory Council and the findings contradicted the minister’s informal results.
Dunvegan found that 55 percent wanted to get rid of the board monopoly on barley sales. Seventy-three percent wanted a vote on the issue.
“He got it wrong,” Wain said last year. “His (Goodale’s) consultation did not tap into what farmers were really thinking.”
Whoops!
Even as Wain was speaking, tens of thousands of farmers were taking advantage of their first chance to vote on the wheat board issue through their ballots in the board advisory committee elections.
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Overwhelmingly, they voted for candidates opposed to weakening the board mandate.
Goodale’s instincts and more traditional consultation methods seemed to have been vindicated.
Dunvegen was far from the only opinion research firm that concluded wheat board forces were in retreat.
Winnipeg-based Angus Reid group has been finding the same result in its surveys.
Executive vice-president Gary Bennewies said close to 60 percent of farmers want dual-market options for continental barley sales. Responses were evenly split on wheat.
AgDecision Research and Consulting, owned by United Grain Growers, found that 76 percent of farmers surveyed wanted a vote on barley and just 28 percent supported the wheat board monopoly on sales to the U.S.
For all of them, the board advisory committee vote was a shock.
It sent opinion pollsters and open-market advocates back to basics, trying to figure out why their research and the election results were so different.
Did the 60 percent of farmers who did not vote represent the balance? Was the sample group questioned not representative? Was the wrong question asked? Did the questions, or the information supplied, bias the result?
At a time when pollsters and “market researchers” are major players in the Canadian political debate and their use is increasing in agriculture, the election results were a blow to the credibility of the process.
Bennewies from Angus Reid says there is no doubt pollsters are picking up real evidence of changing farmer opinions and a breakdown of traditional farmer loyalties.
But he also cautions that such polling results cannot be taken as THE TRUTH.
“You really can influence the result by the questions you ask,” he said. “To find out what farmers are thinking, you need a number of approaches. You can’t take what we give you as the gospel. You take it as one source and marry it to other sources of information.”
