Are leaders debates past their best-before date?
We are seeing the looming extinction of two political species in this federal election — leaders tours and leaders debates.
Both were created for another time, and neither is serving a particularly useful role in helping make citizens make an informed choice a month from now at the ballot box.
Start with Thursday night’s debate, which was hosted by the Globe and Mail in Calgary and moderated by the paper’s editor-in-chief, David Walmsley.
In sheer visual terms, the event cast politics as a private insiders club.
Leaders stood behind podiums against a Gothic, violet-hued photo backdrop of the Parliament buildings (which raises the question about why one would need to go all the way to Calgary to create a big purple Ottawa on a stage).
The three leaders shouted over each other’s remarks and punctuated their talking points with personal shots at their opponents. The best that can be said about this exercise is that it was good training for the empty theatre of question period, which is also well past its bestbefore date in format and democratic utility.
As an added, symbolic bonus, the debate relegated the one woman leader in the House of Commons, the Greens’ Elizabeth May, to the sidelines. While Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau were trading barbs and statistics, May was putting video snippets on Twitter.
Could anyone have painted a more vivid picture of everything offputting about the current state of federal politics? Shouting men, buildings the same colour as cartoon dinosaurs and a woman trying to make herself heard from the outside.
In this supersized election, it is the voters of Canada who are providing us with a far more fascinating picture of the state of our democracy in 2015. Every day, we seem to get a new poll, with graphs resembling a tangled rope of blue, orange and red twine. The three main parties are all within the margin of error in public support, if the polls can be believed (and as we’ve learned, that can be a big “if”).
It tells us that the Canadians who are engaged in this election are weighing all sorts of options and that we may well be living now in post-partisan times.
Several decades ago, it would have been unthinkable that voters would switch back and forth between left and right, seeing all three parties as viable choices for government.
If public opinion remains this tight, we may end up with a result on Oct. 19 that gives no one a clear mandate to govern. Weeks of negotiation could ensue. In that case, we won’t be looking for differences between the political parties — we’ll be looking for points on which they can agree.
The debate on Thursday didn’t give voters much guidance on this level. So, could we come up with a debate format that asks leaders which problems they could solve together? Imagine if the annoying bell in that debate rang every time leaders agreed on a point — for instance, when Mulcair and Trudeau both asserted that pensions were not “taxes,” as Harper has been declaring.
Last week, I hauled out an old National Film Board documentary, filmed during the 1979 election campaign, chronicling the national media covering the leaders tours. My original intent was to see how much had changed in 36 years, but the documentary, called History on the Run, was striking for how much remains the same. Even some of the people in the documentary (or their children) are still players in politics — the current Governor General, David Johnston, was the moderator of the 1979 debate.
Though the reporters were toting typewriters, not laptops, and smoking everywhere, the conversation could well have been plucked from 2015 — too little time to tell the story, too many phoney photo ops and too many perils in pack reporting.
The major difference was that the campaign buses of 1979 had far more reporters than the buses of today, which are down to skeleton crews of a few media organizations. Technology, costs and reduced access to the leaders have made these campaign tours an optional, rather than mandatory, part of election coverage. Next election, they may not exist at all, though it’s unclear what would replace them.
In 2015, it’s official — voters are far more interesting than the political campaigns, and I’m not just talking here of Bathrobe Guy or Angry Conservative Who Thinks Everyone Cheats on Taxes.
At its best, politics is about the art of persuasion, compromise and changing minds. The tangled rope of public opinion tells us Canadian voters are likely engaged in those exercises right now.
For these voters, neither leaders debates nor leaders tours are going to be much help. So why are they still such a big part of elections? sdelacourt@bell.net