WHEN he appeared before the House of Commons agriculture committee last week to grouse about the Canadian Wheat Board, organic farmer Boyd Charles had an opinion about who should have a say if there is a farmer plebiscite on the board monopoly.
Not surprisingly, as an anti-monopoly farmer with 10,000 acres of production at stake, he firmly believes that the bigger the stake in the outcome, the more weight the vote should have. His solution was one acre, one vote.
Charles and supporters undoubtedly would find themselves facing a long line of pro-monopoly critics who would argue that one person, one vote is a democratic right.
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Cogent arguments can be made on both sides of the issue.
But remarkably, although the debate is careening toward a climax, the electorate make-up issue has hardly been broached by either side, at least not in depth.
True, when agriculture minister Chuck Strahl unilaterally decided that any permit book holder who had not delivered to the board in either of the past two years should not automatically have the right to vote, there was an outcry from opponents about undemocratic tampering.
The permit book as electoral ticket was the rule the Liberals wrote into the revised CWB Act in 1998 as the best way to incorporate democratic principles.
Fair enough, then. There was no outcry.
But surely in these politically heated and volatile times, both sides should have an interest in debating the outline of an electorate that would produce a credible result.
Surely it isn’t enough now for critics of Strahl’s move simply to say he is disenfranchising 16,000 “producers” – farmers, as NDP leader Jack Layton asserted, who have been hailed out or droughted out in the past two years and couldn’t deliver.
They know that many “producers” who hold permit books are not real producers at all, or deliver so little grain that the outcome of any CWB vote will not matter a whit to their financial situation.
A former Ottawa neighbour and retired politician almost 20 years out of the hands-on grain business, but with prairie land leased out and a permit book, gleefully voted in advisory board elections. He would be one of the “disenfranchised” producers.
At the very least, defenders of the “every permit book holder” argument owe it to the debate to make the case for a broader electorate with a large minority of voters holding little direct financial stake in the outcome.
At the same time, opponents of a more restricted, commercially determined electorate have the obligation to make their case. Why, in a country where as a basic right a lowly journalist has the same vote weight as billionaire Frank Stronach, should the size of your wallet, or at least your grain production, matter in Canadian Wheat Board elections?
Last week at committee, Manitoba agriculture minister Rosann Wowchuk faced questions about how she would organize a list of farmers to be polled if the province decided to do for its farmers what Ottawa hadn’t then indicated it would do: give them a vote. No one asked her who she considers a farmer with the right to vote.
“You have to come up with a decision on who gets to vote,” Charles later told MPs.
It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request.
