A matter of great debates
New commission has duty to ensure fairness, quality
The idea of entrusting the organization of election debates to an independent commission is a sound one, and long overdue. Televised leaders’ debates have been a part of Canadian elections for nearly fifty years. In most elections they are regarded as the single most important event on the campaign calendar; in some they have been decisive.
Yet we have continued to treat them as if they had just been invented. For decades, the organization of the debates was left to last-minute haggling amongst the political parties and a group of mostly private television networks known as “the consortium.” A core element of the democratic process was defined by the relative bargaining positions of a handful of players, none of whom should have been allowed anywhere near the table: neither the parties, whose selfinterest was obvious, nor the networks, whose standing to make such decisions was obscure.
The results have been consistently disappointing. In any such negotiation, the whip hand is held by those with the least interest in their success: the front-runners, usually the incumbents, for whom the close scrutiny and spontaneity of a debate on live TV presents decidedly more risk than reward. The networks, for their part, would just as soon not show any debates at all — not it if means handing over several hours of prime-time, gratis, on which they might otherwise be selling ads.
So, typically, the debates have been restricted to just one in each official language. The last election might have seemed to mark a break with this, after the prime minister refused to take part in the consortium-organized debates. But while there were, in the end, five debates, only a fraction as many people saw them, strewn as they were across a hodge-podge of different platforms. Once again, self-interest, rather than the public interest, was the guiding principle.
All of which is to say that there was much potential merit in the Liberals’ proposal to take the debates out of the hands of the players and entrench them in law, under the supervision of an impartial Leaders Debates Commission. You’d have to get all-party buy-in, of course, but if the rules were set well in advance of any election, it would be less obvious where any party’s self-interest lay. The chances of reaching a solution that was fair to all, and seen as such, would thus be higher.
So it is dismaying to see what the Liberals have actually produced. The choice of former governor general David Johnston as the first debates commissioner is a good one — but the failure to consult the opposition parties on it is not. Likewise, while the rules governing which leaders should be eligible to participate seem reasonable enough, it is beyond absurd that these should have been dictated unilaterally by the party in power.
Worst of all, we are back to the old rule of one debate in each language — again, unilaterally decreed, and much more obviously in the selfinterest of the likely frontrunner in a campaign that is now (the Liberals having taken three years to deliver on a relatively easy promise) less than a year away. The opportunity to make the debates into something meaningful — and transform the campaigns in the process — would appear to have been squandered.
Done right, debates can make a signal contribution to the public’s ability to assess the leaders and their platforms, offering a rare opportunity to see them up close, unfiltered, and under pressure. Where debates are regular and frequent, they provide structure to a campaign and, crucially, repeated exposures to the candidates: a bad performance can be recovered from, while a flashy fraud can be seen through over time.
But where there is only one debate, it tends to be treated like a prize fight. With everything on the line, candidates are coached within an inch of their lives: either they take no chances (the front-runner) or launch a series of wild attacks (the challengers), in search of the fabled “knock-out blow.” The media focus, inevitably, is on who “won” or “lost,” as if that were the issue, rather than on what was learned. The segregation by language, moreover, means only part of the country is watching at any one time. Rather than bridge the solitudes, they reinforce them; the French debate, in particular, tends to be obsessively focused on the interests and concerns of one province, Quebec.
But all may not be quite lost. What happens next is up to Johnston: his mandate is not only to oversee, along with his fellow commissioners, the debates for the coming election, but to make recommendations for how they might be run in future. It is open to him to suggest that there be not two, but several debates, perhaps one a week throughout the campaign; that each be held in both official languages, rather than one, and so on. For that matter, could the government really stop him if he were to do so this time around?
Does any of this matter? After all, as skeptical commentators have pointed out, you can’t really force the leaders to participate, can you? No. But you can create an expectation that they will. Leaders are not absolutely required to answer questions in Parliament, either, but there is an expectation that they should do so. Neither is anyone legally obliged to participate in a top-rated chat show like Quebec’s Tout le Monde en Parle — but woe betide the leader who ducks it.
Over time, the debates might acquire something of the same status. If they were fair, well-run, with a compelling format, they would become normalized, a campaign ritual no leader would dare to skip. It’s in Johnston’s hands now.