National Post (National Edition)
Timing of leaders debate a raw deal for anyone west of Thunder Bay
EDMON TON • The final English debate — which also happened to be the only English debate where Justin Trudeau bothered to make an appearance — kicked off Monday at 7 p.m. Toronto time.
Lest we all forget, that was 5 p.m. in Saskatoon and Edmonton and Yellowknife. And 4 p.m. in Vancouver, Victoria and Whitehorse.
Which means in three provinces and two territories (and parts of Nunavut, which uses, variously, eastern, central and mountain time) some people wouldn’t even have been finished work, let alone made it home, prepared some dinner, grabbed a beer and parked themselves in front of the television.
Which means that in three provinces and two territories, many, many people likely didn’t get to see the entire debate.
Last night was the only time in the entire election campaign where Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, Maxime Bernier, Jagmeet Singh, Elizabeth May and Yves-François Blanchet all shared a stage and presented their visions for the future of Canada in English.
That may or may not be fair, but what certainly isn’t fair is that British Columbia, basically, gets zero debates and Alberta gets, what, half a debate if we manage to rush home?
Maybe Manitoba gets a full debate — after all, for them, it started at 6 p.m., which is a reasonable hour to get to your TV set.
This is also somewhat more than geographic unfairness, because Monday’s debate was translated into several Indigenous languages and other minority languages, but, given the time zone issues, it was certainly going to be especially difficult for those communities to actually watch.
But the single starkest example of the problematic nature of the debate timing is that there was an entire section of the debate on Indigenous issues.
The relationship between Alberta and British Columbia over energy production and Indigenous opposition to the Trans Mountain Pipeline and Indigenous support of the energy industry in Alberta, has been the story of the past couple years for the westernmost chunk of the country.
And yet these are the two parts of the country that were least likely to be able to watch the debates live — and that’s not even accounting for the fact that there are significant percentages of the northern population who are Indigenous who are also entrapped by this time zone issue.
And yes, obviously, you could have used a PVR — if you own one, of course — to tape the debate and indeed probably watch the whole thing later.
But if you didn’t watch the debate live, you wouldn’t have gotten quite the same insight and commentary from pundits and news organizations via social media, and indeed, the various panels of spin doctors and journalists who disassembled the debate afterward. There is some value to this, surely.
And that doesn’t even account for the other organizational mess that’s been made here, namely, that four of the five moderators work in Ontario.
It is by no means an impeachment of their professional credentials to ask whether or not the experience of living outside of Ontario might have informed their lines of inquiry. As but one example, one of the sections of debate was to be titled “affordability,” which, while certainly a fair issue, is a very, very different thing in Toronto or Vancouver than it is in Saskatoon.
As of press time, it wasn’t even clear to what extent that would be about the economy, which surely are the issues about which voters are most concerned in
FOUR OF THE FIVE MODERATORS WORK IN ONTARIO.
Alberta, but also in the Maritimes.
All of which is to say, these are perhaps good problems for a nation to have: when the biggest issue on a leadership debate night is the time zone, things sure are going well.
But taken in sum, it’s hard to escape the sense that last night was a raw deal for everyone west of Thunder Bay, who are now going to have a harder time making a ballot box choice, unless they plan put in some serious effort to play catch-up in the coming days.