According to the Western Canadian Wheat Growers, electoral boundaries in the coming wheat board elections are unfair because many of them cross provincial boundaries.
It’s possible, some say, that Saskatchewan farmers could be elected to seven director positions, compared to only two Albertans and one Manitoban.
If they are willing to use such silly scare tactics, they might as well have gone all the way and declared that Alberta is guaranteed only one directorship. A B.C. Peace River farmer could be elected in the district encompassing that area.
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Another group could come along tomorrow and with equal validity try to alarm Saskatchewan farmers by telling them there could be only three farmers elected from Saskatchewan, compared to five from Alberta and two from Manitoba.
Such statements serve only to increase suspicion and divisions among Western Canadian grain producers.
The important thing is that farmers across the Prairies will be democratically electing whoever they consider the best of their fellow farmers who are seeking to become directors.
The CWB boundaries were computer-generated so that each electoral district would have a roughly equal number of permit-book holders, who would be in similar soil zones. That makes a lot of sense.
If some farmers want to place a high priority on electing someone from their province, the preferential voting system allows them to do so. They can allocate their preferences so that if a candidate from their province is knocked off during a round of vote-counting, their votes for him or her will be transferred to another candidate from that province.
Most farmers, however, will use their ballots to get the best possible person for the job.
Here again, the preferential ballot will have an important effect, by preventing candidates winning because of vote-splitting.
In politics, for example, a candidate for one party could get elected with only a 31 percent of the vote if three other parties had 23 percent each.
If the CWB election worked the same way, a person opposed to the board’s export monopoly could win if several pro-board candidates split the votes of the pro-board majority.
Under the preferential system, however, each time a pro-board candidate is dropped from the counting, his or her votes would go to another pro-board candidate if that is one of the voters’ key criteria – and if farmers take the time to study all the candidates so they can rank them.
