AND YOU THOUGHT THE SHOW WAS OVER

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is studying the issue of televised leaders’ debates during federal elections. Now, this may seem like a strange sentence if you read it carefully. Are TV election debates Procedure ... or are they House Affairs? Ostensibly, the answer is “Neither.” How did this committee come to be sticking its nose in this subject in the first place?

It’s creative mandate creep. The Procedure Committee has responsibilities for technical matters relating to Commons elections — validity, eligibility, the conduct of Elections Canada. It also has responsibilities for broadcasting — for the broadcasting, that is, of what happens inside the House of Commons. If you kind of smoosh these categories together and blur them, you can create the perception of a grey area that covers TV election debates.

“Broadcaster” is a word, of course, that is rapidly expanding in meaning itself. A lot of us are already in the position of barely remembering what “television” was. Election debates are traditionally handled by a consortium of TV networks, and party leaders go along because “consortium” sounds scary, but the cartel crumbled a bit during the last general election. The highest-profile debate ended up being the one organized by Maclean’s magazine and Paul Wells, as an exercise in proving the thing could be done. Progress has introduced new major “broadcasting” powers to the scene, and Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are all likely to want a piece of the action.

In this fast-changing environment, the Procedure Committee is proposing to create an “independent commissioner” for party leaders’ debates. But, at the same time, the committee is hearing evidence on the development of a single, allencompassing mathematical algorithm for deciding which leaders ought to be eligible for TV debates.

Since the main task of the commissioner would be to make that same decision, writing down a fixed rule would seem to make the existence of a commissioner mostly unnecessary. But it would make a nice little gig for some worn-out Ottawa journalist, and politicians (as the record of Governor General and Senate appointments shows) have trouble resisting those.

It may be all right for the committee to pursue somewhat contradictory paths. The opinions it gathers now about debate eligibility rules could just be left in the hands of a commission, without an explicit directive from the committee. That, in turn, could mitigate optical problems with letting a particular House of Commons make rules for the future.

But whether the Procedure Committee decides to write down a fixed rule, or hire someone to devise one, the only authority it can exercise over a new, fluid universe of “broadcasters” is moral authority — which is to say, whatever moral authority the voting public is prepared to grant it. It will never be able to compel party leaders to participate in any particular televised, or para-televised, debate.

In particular, it will always be hard to obligate a sitting prime minister to participate. And the last election showed that opposition leaders are not likely to be interested in whacking each other for public entertainment if the PM isn’t within reach. In Canada, recent PMs have always felt the need to turn up for at least one debate, but this may be a product of circumstances. No Canadian PM has entered an election lately in such a strong position that he can afford to duck all debates and endure accusations of cowardice. (Things are different in Britain, where TV debates are still regarded somewhat skeptically as a form of low American-style pantomime, and where the PM has the prestige that comes with being able to launch nuclear weapons.)

As with so much of the activity of the House of Commons, Procedure’s inquiry into election debates is a case of solving a problem whose existence is questionable. The old TV consortium, in deciding which leaders participate, always did it more or less intuitively, with an eye to making sure that every possible Next Prime Minister was on the stage. They have surely gotten it mostly right. But, ah, yes, there is the Green Party of Canada, whose main purpose is squawking about having its leader/saint, Elizabeth May, included in every leaders’ debate.

In 2008, after May took over as GPC leader, the larger parties decided it was too much trouble to keep her offstage, and she was included. The GPC vote share spiked from about four and a half points to 6.8 per cent. May’s Greens were then excluded by the consortium in 2011, and received less than 4 per cent of the vote. It has always struck me that the data might be used to argue the Liz Question both ways: was the Green spike from a lone TV appearance a healthy democratic phenomenon, or an anomaly of voter irrationality to be politely discouraged? (How the hell do we know it makes sense to have high-school-type political debates at all?)

Maclean’s let May play ball in 2015, but the Green vote share dropped even further. Now May is proposing an elaborate participation rule that incorporates a vote-share cutoff of four per cent: the Greens being below that level, the rule also conveniently specifies that a leader will be entitled to camera time with the grown-ups if it has both one previously sitting MP and candidates in “nearly all” ridings. This sort of custom tailoring cannot be regarded seriously as a permanent, disinterested democratic principle. On a moral level — the only level on which the Procedure Committee’s investigation can hope to operate at all — it is just an embarrassment.