Voters in the upcoming Canadian Wheat Board director elections won’t be marking their ballots with the traditional single X.
Instead, they will be able to vote for all the candidates on the ballot, in order of preference.
Ralph Goodale, minister in charge of the wheat board, said the preferential system will ensure the director elected in each of the 10 districts gets a clear majority of support.
He likened it to the election of a political party leader.
“It’s pretty standard procedure,” he said, adding the concept was “suggested to us pretty strongly by a significant number of the farm organizations.”
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To win, a candidate needs at least 50 percent plus one of the votes. Voters will mark their ballots with number 1 beside their first choice, number 2 beside their second choice and so on. They don’t have to vote for all of the candidates.
If, when the ballots are counted, no candidate has a clear majority, the candidate with the least number of first preference votes is eliminated. That candidate’s votes are then reassigned to the candidate ranked second on each of those ballots.
This continues until a clear winner is declared.
“That was a Wild Rose suggestion,” said Alan Holt, the president of the Alberta farm organization. “It’s most democratic.”
SWP likes procedure
Saskatchewan Wheat Pool president Leroy Larsen said he likes the preferential ballot: “(It) will take some time to explain to the voters how they might use that but it will certainly give an indication of a clear majority to the winning candidate. I think this is important.”
Keystone Agriculture Producers president Don Dewar said the preferential ballot was the organization’s second choice, behind a modified delegate structure. He wondered about the strategies of a preferential ballot, but said it is better than just voting for one person.
“I think everybody recognizes as a problem that if you have 10 candidates, the winner could have 11 percent of the votes,” he said from Manitoba.
Sinclair Harrison, president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, said it would be much simpler to vote for one candidate.
“It’s somewhat complicated,” he said. “There may be possibilities of manipulating the election depending on how you vote. That concerns us.”
Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association executive director Alanna Koch said the preferential ballot wasn’t “particularly necessary.”
The organization is disappointed that the electoral boundaries announced with the election regulations cross provincial borders.
“There seems to be a bit of an emphasis on ensuring that Saskatchewan gets stronger representation on the board than other provinces and that’s a concern to us because of the general leaning of Saskatchewan producers towards monopoly,” she said.
Goodale said the wheat board is not a provincial agency and noted Saskatchewan could end up with as few as three or as many as seven directors.
“It’s not a particularly healthy thing to constantly try to insert provincial fault lines,” he said.
