STEP UP TO THE MIKE

With dozens of mayoral debates on tap, lesser-known candidates welcome the chance for more face time with voters,

Provincial party leaders debated once during the spring election. The top Toronto mayoral candidates will debate twice.

Twice on Sept. 4, twice on Sept. 15, twice on Sept. 16, twice on Sept. 24, twice on Sept. 30, twice on Oct. 21.

There are three months until the city heads to the polls on Oct. 27. There are 41debates on the schedule as of now — more than four per week during the home stretch after Labour Day. And the list is still growing.

In provincial politics, the lone debate is organized by a secretive consortium of television networks in concert with campaign operatives. In municipal politics, anybody at all can email out invitations.

Dozens of interest groups do. The candidates, wary of irritating any particular constituency or being mocked by someone dressed in a chicken suit, are more or less obliged to accept.

And, thus, Toronto’s electorate has been blessed with a nine-debate mid-September week during which the candidates will clash at venues as varied as the Evergreen Brick Works, the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy, and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

The most important debates will likely be two televised debates scheduled for the last two weeks of the campaign. One has been booked by CBC for Oct. 16, another on CP24 for Oct. 22, according to the candidates.

Most of the debates will either not be broadcast widely or not at all, but any debate presents opportunities for the top candidates to meander into a gaffe. And each debate gives lesserknown contenders, such as Karen Stintz and David Soknacki, a chance to introduce themselves to a substantial number of active voters while elevated, temporarily, to the same level as the leaders. “It’s a double bonus,” Soknacki said. “It’s a bonus of: there we are as equals, speaking directly to voters. And then the second one is that we’re speaking about issues of particular importance to them.” Many candidates do their best to stick to preferred talking points no matter who they are talking to: during 2010 debates, Rob Ford returned to his “gravy train” message regardless of the question. The diversity of debate-organizing interest groups, though, forces the candidates to weigh in on issues they would not otherwise choose to address. At a June debate held by March of Dimes Canada and Community Living Toronto, the candidates made their first comments on the idea of reducing TTC fares for people with disabilities. At the National Ethnic Press debate in May, they struggled to explain how they would improve life at Jane-Finch. That debate was rare: it involved candidates other than the five people widely perceived to be the leaders. While even most five-candidate debates are unwieldy, supporters of the higher-profile long-shot candidates — magazine publisher Sarah Thomson, 19-year-old Morgan Baskin, blunt lawyer Ari Goldkind — believe they too deserve to be included. “It would change everything,” Goldkind said. “People would sort of wake up and say, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t we hear about him? And just because he doesn’t have $1.3 million or the right family connections — we’d love to hear a lot more about what he’s saying, because these are the issues we talk about at our dinner table.’ ”

The leading candidates won’t say anything bad about the number of debates — even Olivia Chow, who has formally proposed to ask the province to shorten future election periods from 10 months to four.

Rival John Tory initially called Chow’s proposal “a solution in search of a problem,” and he said last week that he doesn’t think “you can ever have too many debates.” He softened his position on the length of the campaign itself, saying, after six weeks more glad-handing and six weeks more debating, that the idea of a trim “perhaps warrants consideration.” Visit thestar.com for a current list of scheduled mayoral debates.