Voted down

Others have already discussed the recent Canadian Wheat Board director elections as a reflection. But the most significant sign that the Cons are in danger of losing their rural base may be the fact that even the one anti-monopoly director who Strahl managed to place on the board doesn't appreciate the Cons' tactics:

In District 1, Henry Vos, who farms near Fairview, Alta., unseated incumbent Arthur Macklin by roughly 200 votes. But Macklin, who supports the board's monopoly, said the vote result may have been tainted by an unexpected change to the voting rules.

Macklin said Strahl decided during the election period to change the eligibility for voting, excluding farmers who had not delivered grain to the wheat board in the previous 15 months. The defeated director says that eliminated nearly half the votes in his district.

"I guess he felt that if those voters were eliminated from the list, it would maybe make a difference in the results of the election," Macklin said Sunday in an interview. "In fact, he misled the House of Commons and misled the public in terms of the wheat board supporting this change when it didn't."

Vos also said he's not happy with the way the federal minister intervened during the election campaign, although he'd like to see changes in the board's marketing policies.

"It really took attention away from what I thought the issues should be," Vos said in a telephone interview. "It kept focusing (the campaign) on the agenda of the federal government, which was quite a distraction."

Again, with another district actually flipping toward a pro-CWB director, Strahl's attempts to alter the election process didn't manage to undo the pro-CWB majority. And with Strahl's meddling apparently earning him only varying degrees of enmity from the new directors rather than any new friends, it looks more and more likely that the Cons are only sealing their own electoral fate by trying to manipulate the CWB's internal workings.