What if the recent barley plebiscite had offered farmers two choices instead of three? Out of curiousity, reporter Adrian Ewins recently pulled out his calculator, made a few assumptions and came up with the following analysis. This isn’t meant to suggest which side would have won in a two-horse race. It’s just a bit of fun. Make your assumptions, plug in your own numbers and come to your own conclusions.
There’s one lingering question left over from the federal government’s barley plebiscite. Unfortunately it’s a question to which there is no answer.
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What if there had been two options instead of three?
How would farmers have voted if they had been asked to choose between the single desk and the open market rather than the three options they were given?
The only way to answer that question would be to know how the 48.4 percent of farmers who voted for option 2 – selling to the CWB or any other buyer – would have voted if that choice wasn’t available.
No one can know the answer but there may be a way to gain a rough idea of the possible outcome of a two-option federal plebiscite, at least in one province.
A few weeks before the federal plebiscite, Manitoba held its own vote, asking farmers to indicate their support for either the single desk or the open market.
Comparing how Manitoba farmers cast their ballots in the provincial and federal plebiscites may provide a hint of how things could have gone if Ottawa had offered just two choices.
If nothing else, it might provide a topic for some spirited coffee row conversation.
Here’s what happened in Manitoba.
In the provincial barley plebiscite, of the 7,231 farmers who cast ballots, 62 percent voted for a single desk and 38 percent for an open market.
In the federal vote, of the 3,703 Manitobans who cast ballots, 51 percent voted for a single desk, 15 percent for an open market and 35 percent for marketing choice.
In other words, when the Manitoba farmers who voted for marketing choice were forced to choose between two options, 33 percent of them opted for the single desk and 67 percent for the open market.
Whether voters in the other provinces would have split the same way is, again, unknowable.
Based on the results of the federal vote, Manitoba is the most pro-single desk province, so one might assume the split would have been more favourable for the open market side in the other provinces.
For argument’s sake, assume that in Saskatchewan, 70 percent of the Option 2 supporters would have voted for the open market in a two-choice ballot, 80 percent in Alberta and 70 percent in British Columbia.
That would have a produced a federal result that looks like this:
- Manitoba: 62 percent for the single desk, 38 percent for the open market.
- Saskatchewan: 58 percent single desk, 43 percent open market.
- Alberta: 34 percent single desk, 66 percent open market.
- British Columbia: 57 percent single desk, 43 percent open market.
When those percentages are applied against the total votes cast in each province, the results are as follows: the single desk option would have received 14,603 votes, or 50.2 percent, the open market options would have received 14,464 votes, or 49.8 percent.
Obviously the assumptions about how the Option 2 votes would have split in a two-way choice can be debated.
Under different scenarios, either the single desk or the open market could have gained the advantage.
But the one thing that does seem clear is that if farmers had been given two options to choose from, the results would have been extremely close, which in turn would have made the federal government’s decision on how to proceed that much more difficult.
