Spread out the debate dynamic
Less than two minutes before the Maclean’s National Leaders Debate began last Aug. 6 — a year ago this weekend — Stephen Harper knocked a glass of water off a little shelf built into the back of his lectern. The glass fell to the ground, splashing water everywhere.
Harper, still the prime minister of Canada, heading into his fifth round of televised debates as a national party leader, looked briefly helpless and bent down as if to clear up the mess. He needn’t have worried. Members of the redoubtable Rogers in-studio crew moved in with towels. By the time the broadcast started, there was no sign of the little incident.
For months after the debate I forgot about the spilled water. I was the debate’s moderator. I had bigger things to worry about. Much later I heard that when Justin Trudeau tells the story of his first national debate he usually mentions Harper spilling the water glass. Not because it hurt Harper’s composure, but because in Trudeau’s eyes, this evidence of fallibility brought his more experienced Conservative opponent down to human scale. If Harper could fumble a water glass, he could make other mistakes. The Liberal leader’s morale ticked up. Two hours later the debate was over, and Trudeau had begun to generate the momentum that would take his Liberals to government.
That was not the original plan. The Maclean’s debate was the first national election debate organized by somebody besides the traditional consortium of broadcast networks. Much of the impetus for that radical departure from the norm was the belief, shared by Harper and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, that they could outperform Trudeau in a debate. So there should be a lot of debates. It was the NDP that first told me they would be open to nontraditional debates. The Conservatives were not shy either. The Green Party, of course, was eager to get Elizabeth May onto a stage with the others under any condition.
That left the Liberals. They waited for weeks to reply, tried to change the format Maclean’s had proposed, were in a lousy mood about the whole thing. What they didn’t say was that Trudeau had been rehearsing for debates since the previous fall. He came ready.
And now Trudeau is prime minister, and perhaps understandably, I find myself wondering what leaders’ debates will look like in the future.
It’s not idle speculation. In Trudeau’s “mandate letter” outlining the tasks he was confiding to Maryam Monsef when he made her Minister of Democratic Institutions, Trudeau tasked her with fulfilling a Liberal election promise. He told her to “bring forward options to create an independent commissioner to organize political party leaders’ debates during future federal election campaigns, with a mandate to improve Canadians’ knowledge of the parties, their leaders, and their policy positions.”
It won’t be an easy job. Opposition MPs report Monsef has already started asking them for ideas. The challenge is to reconcile the need for a large audience with the large broadcasters’ increasingly tenuous claim to a natural oligopoly on these things.
In 2015, mostly because Mulcair and Harper guessed wrong about Trudeau and because Harper was in a snit about the CBC, the doors blew off. Debates were organized by a half-dozen different host organizations. Quality varied. Formats, topics and the lineup of leaders changed, in ways that kept things interesting.
Audiences were smaller than for the consortium debate, in part because consortium members declined to carry non-consortium debates. I could argue about that one all day.
But there would be nothing magical about an independent commission. Donald Trump is threatening to boycott the U.S. debates, which are organized by superannuated Democrat and Republican insiders trained by years of habit to protect their parties’ interest, not by any perfect moral authority. Any independent process will have precisely as much legitimacy as any candidate wants to give it.
It’s easy to imagine an “independent” body in Canada organizing unwatchably orthodox debates, with leaders of six or eight parties staring dutifully at in-studio screens while demographically correct focus groups tweet in their questions.
A simple rule to avoid some of this: A Monsef-designed, Trudeauendorsed commission should bestow no monopoly on debate design, either to itself or to news organizations whose only claim is experience. Don’t shut them out, either, I hasten to add — but make sure there is some process for letting surprising new ideas in.
Universities, student groups, groups representing women or Indigenous Canadians: Everyone has a stake in putting tough questions to our leaders. At least some should get a shot at it. Paul Wells is a national affairs writer.