Debating the need for federal election debates

ARE THESE DEBATES TECHNICALLY A ‘PUBLIC GOOD?’

You might have heard that there is a new report on broadcast electoral debates from the House of Commons standing committee on procedure. And, then again, you might not have heard: the report was issued this week, but it got overshadowed by outbursts of theatre in both chambers of Parliament, along with the usual fog of extraparliamentary action.

The report, which offers guiding principles for the creation of a federal government election debate regulator, was supported by a majority of the committee’s members. But the Conservatives on the committee dissented and signed a minority report — one which asks why any such regulation is needed at all.

This is obviously a probl em, because one of the principles espoused in the majority report is that the creation of a regulatory body for debates ought to have support from a broad range of political parties. You will remember that this is what the Liberals said about electoral reform, although in that case they made the mistake of promising the reform first, and only later acknowledging that reform would need consensus in order to happen. Here, the stakes are lower. The party in power can probably afford to treat the report in favour of ambitious reform as a dead letter.

Which, I have to say, is the phrase that comes to mind in reading it. Having read through it, and made it through the scathing Conservative dissent at the end of the report, you might have thought that the authors of the main text would have included some good, strong language about the justification for a Federal Party Leaders’ Debates Commissioner. This seems like a natural starting point for the writing itself, doesn’t it? Step one: here’s an explanation of the actual, existing problem this document is intended to help solve!

You will have to l ook pretty hard for anything of the sort. At one point, for example, we are diverted by this musing:

“Having reviewed the history of federal party leaders’ debates in Canada and examined the role that the debates have assumed over time during election campaigns, a key question that emerged for the committee was whether federal party leaders’ debates could be considered a public good?”

Your r eac t i on to t his ought to be “Good point! That is a key question! Darned key!” There is an obvious possibility that the very existence of broadcast leaders’ debates distorts the popular perception of the Canadian political system, and that it aggrandizes the cult of the party leader within Canadian politics. Is it a good thing, ethically, that we patronize a performative medium that encourages all this? And then there’s a separate economic question, tacitly raised here: are these debates technically a “public good?”

The report doesn’t give a straight answer to any of this, or deal with it much at all. The reply immediately given in the text is that some of the committee’s witnesses felt that “providing some formality to leaders’ debates would be consistent with Canada’s electoral framework.” This doesn’t imply that the debates should exist at all, much less that they require “formality” supplied by monolithic state authority.

The report then cites the executive director of the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates: she tells us that the American broadcast debates, the ones we Canadians have fallen into the habit of imitating, are desirable because they “belong to the public.” This sounds terrific, until you remember that the Commission on Presidential Debates is a private corporation. I guess our Commons committee wasn’ t fussy about where its evidence in favour of public- imposed debate reform happened to come from.

If you do happen to like broadcast party leaders’ debates, it is hard to see how you were badly served in the 2015 federal election, which featured the unprecedented total of five. This situation came about because forces outside of the declining old broadcast networks, and particularly t he Rogersowned Maclean’s magazine, made a conscious decision not to sit still for the traditional status quo on debates.

We are in an environment of rapid change in media. Imposing a centralized regimen for debating seems like an inadequate or inappropriate answer to this — unless it can be shown that 2015 was a failure in some way.

The Committee was told that the “combined viewership” of the 2015 debates was 10 million, which — if watching debates is healthy — is not too bad, considering that only 18 million or so of us voted in the subsequent election.

Other witnesses, however, insisted that the ratings for the 2015 debates had been “alarmingly low.” Again, this raises the unanswered question of whether we ought to be pleased rather than alarmed, and it makes one wonder — idly, since no evidence is offered — whether the existence of a salaried Debates Commissioner would actually help.

But wait — if we are Canadians not watching the debates, perhaps on the premise that verbal sparring in makeup and hairspray might not be the ultimate test of a chief minister, isn’t the problem actually ... with us? Good Lord! The report shrinks from the obvious conclusion, but at least implies it: in the words of Brecht’s poem, perhaps the lazy, apathetic Canadian people have forfeited the confidence of the government, and ought to be dissolved in order that another might be elected?

HE MAY BE THE MOST PRO-RELIGION PRESIDENT. — MARC A. THIESSEN