The federal government and barley plebiscite co-ordinator KPMG were scrambling last week to do damage control after critics of the exercise raised questions about the confidentiality of the vote.
On Parliament Hill, the issue became the latest focus of opposition questioning as one MP accused the Conservatives of wanting to know how people vote so they can “hunt down” farmers who vote in favour of the Canadian Wheat Board barley monopoly.
The issue also was referred to the federal ethics commission and the privacy commissioner.
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At the centre of the storm was the fact that the ballots mailed to farmers are numbered and the same number appears on the “voter eligibility” sheet the producer must sign and mail back to be eligible to vote.
Critics said it could be used to check on how an individual farmer voted.
On Feb. 23, KPMG issued a statement insisting the ballots are numbered only to make sure ineligible voters do not vote.
“KPMG has established separate processes for the verification of declaration forms and the tabulation (of the vote),” said the company. “The declarations and ballots will be destroyed by KPMG at the completion of the tabulation of results.”
In Ottawa, agriculture minister Chuck Strahl insisted in an interview there was nothing sinister in the ballot numbering and that it had nothing to do with the government.
“The point is the government never gets its hands on these ballots,” he said. “I never see them, we never touch them, we never have anything to do with them.”
He said the system was designed by KPMG and not on government instruction.
That is not how opposition MPs saw it.
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter said the ballot numbering system undermines the right to a secret ballot.
The same day, NDP critic Alex Atamanenko wrote to the privacy and ethics commissioners suggesting they look into the balloting process, the questions and government tactics in its campaign against the wheat board monopoly.
There was no immediate indication if House ethics commissioner Bernard Shapiro or privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart would take up Atamanenko’s request for an investigation.
