Single desk supporters are declaring victory in a 2004 Canadian Wheat Board election marred by administrative glitches, court challenges and low voter turnout.
Pro-monopoly candidates triumphed in all four even-numbered districts where voters cast ballots. Jim Chatenay, who took District 2 by acclamation, was the only dual market proponent to gain a directorship.
“I think it’s a pretty good victory for the board,” said former District 10 director Wilf Harder, who decided not to run in the 2004 campaign after dedicating 18 years of his life to the agency.
He said the results should send a clear message to Ottawa.
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“Government bureaucrats have been backsliding on their support for the wheat board for a long time. This election should be a wake-up call to those political parties and to those politicians who like to say the board isn’t popular among farmers.”
For three of the four pro-board candidates it was a convincing first ballot victory. Ken Ritter, Ian McCreary and newcomer Bill Toews took 69 percent, 61 percent and 53 percent of the vote respectively in their districts.
It was a tighter race for dual-marketer-turned-board-supporter Rod Flaman. He built on a foundation of 29 percent of first round ballots by being the second, third and fourth choice of many farmers, and ended up with 61 percent of the final vote.
Flaman said in past elections single desk supporters garnered 51 percent, or a little more than half of the votes. This time around they received 66 percent, or two-thirds, of first round ballots.
“That’s a huge, huge swing.”
But voluntary marketing proponents suggest nothing can be read into the results due to low voter turnout, procedural irregularities and an outright rejection of the entire process by those who do not support the board’s monopoly.
(See Voters support CWB, page 2)
Art Mainil, who ran against Flaman in District 8, failed to get a court injunction preventing the counting of ballots. But he plans to seek a judicial review of an election where 792 eligible voters were inadvertently left off the initial mailout of ballots, an oversight deemed a “serious issue” by a Federal Court judge.
“We’ve got a Third-World, banana republic election process here that makes the Ukrainian election look like a tea party,” said the Weyburn, Sask., farmer.
Mainil wants the results thrown out in favour of a new election co-ordinated by a group like the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities using Elections Canada rules.
Lower turnout
Brenda Tjaden Lepp, who dropped out of the District 10 race due to family medical reasons, said the real story in the 2004 election is low voter turnout.
CWB supporters argue 32.7 percent is a good response rate for this type of mail-in ballot, but according to election co-ordinator Peter Eckersley it is 10 percentage points below the turnout for the same four districts in 2000, as well as elections conducted in 1998 and 2002.
“We’re obviously very disappointed this time around,” said Eckersley. “There certainly seemed to be a lot of apathy.”
Tjaden Lepp suspects the problem is that voters are fed up with the one-farmer-one-vote process used by the CWB.
If the marketing agency wants to be viewed as a true corporation rather than an extension of the federal government, future elections need to reflect the vested interest of producers by weighting their votes based on a factor like seeded acreage of wheat and barley.
“A guy with one share in Nortel does not get the same vote as somebody with 10,000 shares,” said the grain market analyst.
Eckersley had suggestions on how to improve the next round of elections.
In addition to making procedural changes to include permit holders who have not recently marketed wheat or barley, there has to be a thorough review of district assignment because “a fair number” of producers had to be transferred in or out of the even-numbered districts.
“If people were all placed in the right district the number of complaints would be down and the whole feeling about the election would be a little more upbeat,” said the accountant.
Flaman said establishing an independent five-person electoral commission to remedy procedural problems is at the top of his priority list when the new board meets for the first time later this month.
