Shifting strategies push all-candidate forums to the sidelines

As parties rely more on data analytics and artificial intelligence to target potential voters, some candidates are choosing to skip debates

WATERLOO — Political candidates skipping out on debates is nothing new — but in 2018, they’ve also never been less necessary when it comes to reaching voters.

Debate organizers around the province are criticizing the Ontario PC Party for what appears to be a strategy to avoid the potential scrutiny from local all-candidates debates.

While party leader Doug Ford insists he’s given no such instruction, one political observer agrees that attending debates or panels can be risky for candidates and not always a good use of their time.

“For a campaign strategy, it’s understandable why many candidates don’t want to be a part of local debates,” said Anna Esselment, an assistant professor in the political science department at the University of Waterloo.

“But if you look at it from democratic participation, and trying to be an elected representative and showing people what you stand for, it’s a loss for the community.”

Setting aside concerns about the public’s right to question candidates in an open forum, many debates are often packed with partisan supporters — and very few undecided voters, she said.

“The time that it takes to prepare for debates, that takes away from their on-the-ground operation,”

Esselment said. “Some candidates would probably say debates are not worth the cost of not being able to knock on doors.”

On Tuesday night, Waterloo PC candidate Dan Weber was criticized by his opponents for skipping a debate on child care policy.

Last week, Kitchener Centre candidate Mary Henein Thorn declined to take part in a CBC panel that discussed transit, health care and social housing.

At a May 10 debate on education hosted by the Catholic teachers’ union, all five Waterloo Region PC candidates were absent.

Waterloo NDP MPP Catherine Fife said Weber’s absence in the recent child care debate is just the latest in the trend of PC candidates “skipping job interviews.”

“Debates are part of the democratic process. By choosing to stay away, it’s disrespectful to the people who’ve taken the time to come out and invest time in deciding how they’re going to vote,” Fife said.

Weber said he’s been asked to attend “dozens” of debates and panels during the four-week campaign, and while he’s going to some, it’s not a good use of his campaign’s time and energy to attend them all.

“It’s a very short race, and in this process the goal is to reach as many voters as possible,” Weber said. “It can take me five hours or more to prepare for a debate. In that time, I could easily talk to hundreds of people at the doors.”

Fife believes there are many undecided voters who attend debates, and thanks to social media, candidates’ responses at those forums are often widely distributed.

“Are there a lot of debates? Yes. But this is the kind of community that demands that level of accountability,” she said. “But not showing up, he’s choosing to not be accountable.”

There’s another reason why candidates may be avoiding debates. Thanks to new technology, they need them less and less.

All of Ontario’s major parties are increasingly relying on data analytics and artificial intelligence to target their campaigns in a way that maximizes their effectiveness and makes the best use of party volunteers’ time.

Door-to-door canvassing remains one of the most critical ways parties mobilize voters, and these new tools help them collect as much data as they can about voters’ intentions when they show up at the doorstep.

That information, which can help parties zero in on which doors to knock on and which to avoid, is collected in large databases and jealously guarded.

“The reason parties are moving to these tools is that the volunteer base has been shrinking steadily. You don’t have 50 people making phone calls for the local campaign anymore,” Esselment said.

“Parties have to somehow fill that gap. New digital communication technologies or analytics can help do that.”

Weber, who did attend a debate on post-secondary education at Wilfrid Laurier University and plans to be at several others, said it’s all about targeting resources where they’re most effective.

“We have to be very selective about how we spend our time,” he said. “We have a huge team of volunteers, but there are limits to what you can do. So we have to target in on what’s going to be most effective.”

Debates, increasingly, don’t appear to be worth it for some candidates.

Elections have long heaped focus on leaders over individual candidates, Esselment said. That’s why it’s not surprising some parties may want to avoid the risk of exposing their candidates to public scrutiny.

“Many candidates aren’t armed in quite the same way. They’re probably better prepared to attack the government, but they don’t really have a lot to offer themselves,” she said.

“That might lead to some candidates thinking, ‘I don’t really want to put myself in a position where I can get needled with a question that I can’t actually answer.’”