federal debate
- Thread starter spaminator
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After Monday night, it’s time to fix the debates
The verbal bunfight that was billed as an election leaders’ debate on Monday night accomplished at least one thing: a national consensus on an important issue.
Which is that this debate was a mess, and for the sake of our democracy we have to figure out a way to do better. A lot better.
Six leaders, five moderators and a format that lent itself to anything but real debate. A bit of heat and some nifty zingers (Jagmeet Singh’s description of Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer as “Mr. Delay and Mr. Deny” on climate change was clever). But for anyone trying to get a measure of these people, it was an evening of frustration.
The national Leaders’ Debates Commission set up last year by the Trudeau government and chaired by former governor general David Johnston is due to produce a report suggesting how the process can be improved for the next time around.
Johnston would do voters a big service by proposing a fundamental re-think of how we do national debates.
He should start with the number of debates. Two (one in each official language) just isn’t enough. Our federal elections go on for five to seven weeks, plenty of time for at least two in each language. If the parties truly had voters’ interests in mind and not just their own partisan advantage, they’d have a debate a week.
Monday night showed there should be fewer leaders on stage. Maxime Bernier shouldn’t have been there — not because his ideological positions are so objectionable but because the People’s Party is a fringe group. Nor should Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet be included in an English debate when he doesn’t bother to run candidates in more than three-quarters of ridings. National debates are for leaders of national parties.
The format should encourage extended interaction among the main players, not 30-second jabs and rehearsed soundbites. Voters want to see the leaders with a real chance of holding power go at one another directly. That’s the whole point of a debate, after all.
It’s understandable that the moderators on Monday evening (all of them very able journalists) had to whistle down leaders who ran over their time. But that’s because they were trying to jam too much into two hours of TV time.
And enough already with the reach-out to pre-screened samplings of “ordinary Canadians.” We get the point; it’s a nod to the populist mood of the times and it plays well on TV. But it’s time-consuming and ultimately not very informative. Panels of regular voters should have their chance (as in the CBC’s town hall sessions with the leaders last week) but a national TV debate is the time for tightly focused, probing questions.
Finally, the debates must be held at a time when the maximum number of voters will see them. Scheduling Monday night’s event at 7 p.m. Eastern time meant it aired at 4 p.m. in British Columbia and 5 p.m. in Alberta — when people are on their way home or getting dinner. What better way to tell the West that this isn’t a truly “national” debate?
We know the networks don’t want to air debates later in the evening because it would mean losing more prime-time revenue. Well, too bad for them. It should be a condition of their broadcasting license that they air debates when the debates commission schedules them. Aside from minority government situations, this comes around only every four years.
That said, the polls show that a minority is a real possibility after Oct. 21. Which means another election may be upon us sooner rather than later.
Voters shouldn’t have to endure another debate experience as disappointing as this one. The debates commission should lose no time after election day in drawing up recommendations to fix this broken process.
www.msn.com/en-ca/news/elections/after-monday-night-its-time-to-fix-the-debates/ar-AAItZuw
I could not agree more. What a waste of my time. It would be interesting to hear the stats on how many people bothered to tune in. In addition, find moderators who actually know how to do the job and aren't in love with hearing their own voices.
The verbal bunfight that was billed as an election leaders’ debate on Monday night accomplished at least one thing: a national consensus on an important issue.
Which is that this debate was a mess, and for the sake of our democracy we have to figure out a way to do better. A lot better.
Six leaders, five moderators and a format that lent itself to anything but real debate. A bit of heat and some nifty zingers (Jagmeet Singh’s description of Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer as “Mr. Delay and Mr. Deny” on climate change was clever). But for anyone trying to get a measure of these people, it was an evening of frustration.
The national Leaders’ Debates Commission set up last year by the Trudeau government and chaired by former governor general David Johnston is due to produce a report suggesting how the process can be improved for the next time around.
Johnston would do voters a big service by proposing a fundamental re-think of how we do national debates.
He should start with the number of debates. Two (one in each official language) just isn’t enough. Our federal elections go on for five to seven weeks, plenty of time for at least two in each language. If the parties truly had voters’ interests in mind and not just their own partisan advantage, they’d have a debate a week.
Monday night showed there should be fewer leaders on stage. Maxime Bernier shouldn’t have been there — not because his ideological positions are so objectionable but because the People’s Party is a fringe group. Nor should Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet be included in an English debate when he doesn’t bother to run candidates in more than three-quarters of ridings. National debates are for leaders of national parties.
The format should encourage extended interaction among the main players, not 30-second jabs and rehearsed soundbites. Voters want to see the leaders with a real chance of holding power go at one another directly. That’s the whole point of a debate, after all.
It’s understandable that the moderators on Monday evening (all of them very able journalists) had to whistle down leaders who ran over their time. But that’s because they were trying to jam too much into two hours of TV time.
And enough already with the reach-out to pre-screened samplings of “ordinary Canadians.” We get the point; it’s a nod to the populist mood of the times and it plays well on TV. But it’s time-consuming and ultimately not very informative. Panels of regular voters should have their chance (as in the CBC’s town hall sessions with the leaders last week) but a national TV debate is the time for tightly focused, probing questions.
Finally, the debates must be held at a time when the maximum number of voters will see them. Scheduling Monday night’s event at 7 p.m. Eastern time meant it aired at 4 p.m. in British Columbia and 5 p.m. in Alberta — when people are on their way home or getting dinner. What better way to tell the West that this isn’t a truly “national” debate?
We know the networks don’t want to air debates later in the evening because it would mean losing more prime-time revenue. Well, too bad for them. It should be a condition of their broadcasting license that they air debates when the debates commission schedules them. Aside from minority government situations, this comes around only every four years.
That said, the polls show that a minority is a real possibility after Oct. 21. Which means another election may be upon us sooner rather than later.
Voters shouldn’t have to endure another debate experience as disappointing as this one. The debates commission should lose no time after election day in drawing up recommendations to fix this broken process.
www.msn.com/en-ca/news/elections/after-monday-night-its-time-to-fix-the-debates/ar-AAItZuw
I could not agree more. What a waste of my time. It would be interesting to hear the stats on how many people bothered to tune in. In addition, find moderators who actually know how to do the job and aren't in love with hearing their own voices.
Rex Murphy: That wasn't a debate. Nor was it national. It was tokenism, and feeble at that
From the perspective of simple utility, how it assisted voters to make up their minds, Monday night’s exhibition — the so-called debate — was a waste of time. I came away from it with one dominant impression: that the only purpose such debates may claim is to provide journalists with a once-in-four-years opportunity to over- and mis-use the most stale cliché in all reporting history — the “knockout punch.”
E.g., “Mr. Singh had a good line — Mr. Deny and Mr. Delay — but it wasn’t a knockout punch.” Or, “Mr. Scheer came on really strong against Mr. Trudeau in the beginning, but it wasn’t a knockout punch.”
Why journalists are addicted to a boxing metaphor — boxing being a competition between two fighters (obviously) fighting each other — for a spectacle involving six politicians firing over-scripted talking points at each other, while displaying their powers of equivocation and evasion — is a mystery not worth the effort to solve.
Throw in the presence of five — five — moderators and what you have is a jumble of crosstalk, interruption, pre-fab bullet points offered as spontaneous eloquence, and two hours of tangled posturing. Eleven people can’t “debate” anything. As everyone tried to grasp their few seconds of camera time, it triggered the image, frequently seen on television, of Japanese commuters being jammed by guards into already over-stuffed subway cars. Furthermore, they weren’t on stage to debate — it was far more a competition to see who could rhetorically wound one or another of the competitors than an effort to deal in any way comprehensively with the major issues of the election. This tactic, elegantly summarized in Bruce Carson’s The Morning Brief as “leaders who came with pre-planned attacks or ‘drive-by smears’ ready to unload,” is actually the essence, the core dynamic, of these encounters.
The format was a mess with far too many people on the stage, issues chopped down to fit the “segments” rather than the segments being open to allow depth to treat the issues, and a ludicrous tag-teaming of moderators, all bracketed by a Niagara of pre- and post-analysis and insta-judgments. As the noble Christie Blatchford put it: “I missed a Leafs game for this …”
OK. Having got the minor concerns out of the way, here are the real reasons this was a mess and an insult. First, it was just one debate, held in Ottawa, constructed within the purely Ottawa journalistic mindset of what is and is not an issue, and chewed over on television and the internet very largely from within that mindset.
This was the one and only debate for all the provinces and territories (outside Quebec, which gets two debates) to be conducted in English. The range of interests and issues in the regions and provinces of Canada were not and could not possibly be served by last night’s claustrophobic contest.
Let us go to the ever-worthy and oh-so-pious issue of “climate change” on which all the leaders (exception, Maxime Bernier) scrambled to be first and most conspicuous at the altar rail. The biggest question on this issue, and therefore not to be asked, is whether Canada should be tying itself into regulatory and taxation knots to do anything about climate change at all. Even if you accept all the premises of global warming, there is a kernel fact here that reduces every leader’s position — even Elizabeth May’s — to spurious pretence, the ultimate expression of policy commitment as aggravated virtue-signalling.
Canada, the country, is at best a minor, a minuscule contributor to climate change. Canada can do virtually nothing, nothing, to halt or stop it. And for all their talk of concern on the issue, and their deep promises to savagely reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, not one of the leaders (with the possible exception of May) dare commit to the reduction in quality of life that stopping all oil and gas development, and all industry that depends on reliable energy, would inevitably entail. The entire debate is a charade. We know it, and the politicians squirming to be front-of-the-line virtuous on this issue know it, too.
Now back to the leaders’ debate. How can there be a national consideration of climate change when Albertan interests, Newfoundland’s interests, and all the interests of those whose work and life revolve around ready energy supply, are not equally represented with those promising to “transition to net emission-free” energy by 2050 (a fantastical, impossible target). Translated, what that commitment amounts to is a pledge to change Canada’s entire industrial and domestic energy base in 30 years. It is a pledge to shut down the central economic base of at least two provinces. It is putting the whole province of Alberta on notice that “we’re shutting you down.”
Is this not a question that deserves its own debate, in the province most to be affected?” If all the leaders so invested in climate change believe what they are saying, should they not at least leave Ottawa and go out to the province they intend to shut down and hear from the people there? If there are two “national” debates for, and held in, Quebec, should there not be at least one for, and held in, Alberta? I would like to hear one good reason — good, I said — why there cannot.
Similarly for the North and all of the particular, endemic concerns of Canada’s northern peoples. Why not an all leaders’ debate in Whitehorse? Why not more than one held in primarily rural areas, in front of loggers or farmers or fishermen? British Columbia has a dynamic and diverse political culture. Why should we discuss, or more accurately skip over, British Columbia’s interests from within a museum in Ottawa?
I could go on (except I have a wise editor) but I’ll summarize the points. Monday night’s debate was not a debate. It was tokenism, and pretty feeble tokenism at that. The issues of this vast and highly differentiated country cannot be shoehorned into a two-hour shout fest, chopped down to 40-second nuggets, in front of a very select audience in no way representative of the nature of our country.
Leaders have weeks in a national campaign. There is no reason why, with all their various stops, each leader and each party could not put in a debate a week in all the country’s regions. No reason why they should not face the people who they are talking about. Calgary, Vancouver and St. John’s have as much claim on their presence as Ottawa or Montreal. And the rural areas of this country have as much claim as Calgary, Vancouver and St. John’s.
The reason we do not have these debates is that each party and each leader wishes to reduce their risks and stay away from any venue not organized and controlled by their campaign teams. To pretend what we saw last night was in any real sense a “national” debate is laughable. It was neither national, nor a debate.
nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/rex-murphy-that-wasnt-a-debate-nor-was-it-national-it-was-tokenism-and-feeble-at-that
From the perspective of simple utility, how it assisted voters to make up their minds, Monday night’s exhibition — the so-called debate — was a waste of time. I came away from it with one dominant impression: that the only purpose such debates may claim is to provide journalists with a once-in-four-years opportunity to over- and mis-use the most stale cliché in all reporting history — the “knockout punch.”
E.g., “Mr. Singh had a good line — Mr. Deny and Mr. Delay — but it wasn’t a knockout punch.” Or, “Mr. Scheer came on really strong against Mr. Trudeau in the beginning, but it wasn’t a knockout punch.”
Why journalists are addicted to a boxing metaphor — boxing being a competition between two fighters (obviously) fighting each other — for a spectacle involving six politicians firing over-scripted talking points at each other, while displaying their powers of equivocation and evasion — is a mystery not worth the effort to solve.
Throw in the presence of five — five — moderators and what you have is a jumble of crosstalk, interruption, pre-fab bullet points offered as spontaneous eloquence, and two hours of tangled posturing. Eleven people can’t “debate” anything. As everyone tried to grasp their few seconds of camera time, it triggered the image, frequently seen on television, of Japanese commuters being jammed by guards into already over-stuffed subway cars. Furthermore, they weren’t on stage to debate — it was far more a competition to see who could rhetorically wound one or another of the competitors than an effort to deal in any way comprehensively with the major issues of the election. This tactic, elegantly summarized in Bruce Carson’s The Morning Brief as “leaders who came with pre-planned attacks or ‘drive-by smears’ ready to unload,” is actually the essence, the core dynamic, of these encounters.
The format was a mess with far too many people on the stage, issues chopped down to fit the “segments” rather than the segments being open to allow depth to treat the issues, and a ludicrous tag-teaming of moderators, all bracketed by a Niagara of pre- and post-analysis and insta-judgments. As the noble Christie Blatchford put it: “I missed a Leafs game for this …”
OK. Having got the minor concerns out of the way, here are the real reasons this was a mess and an insult. First, it was just one debate, held in Ottawa, constructed within the purely Ottawa journalistic mindset of what is and is not an issue, and chewed over on television and the internet very largely from within that mindset.
This was the one and only debate for all the provinces and territories (outside Quebec, which gets two debates) to be conducted in English. The range of interests and issues in the regions and provinces of Canada were not and could not possibly be served by last night’s claustrophobic contest.
Let us go to the ever-worthy and oh-so-pious issue of “climate change” on which all the leaders (exception, Maxime Bernier) scrambled to be first and most conspicuous at the altar rail. The biggest question on this issue, and therefore not to be asked, is whether Canada should be tying itself into regulatory and taxation knots to do anything about climate change at all. Even if you accept all the premises of global warming, there is a kernel fact here that reduces every leader’s position — even Elizabeth May’s — to spurious pretence, the ultimate expression of policy commitment as aggravated virtue-signalling.
Canada, the country, is at best a minor, a minuscule contributor to climate change. Canada can do virtually nothing, nothing, to halt or stop it. And for all their talk of concern on the issue, and their deep promises to savagely reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, not one of the leaders (with the possible exception of May) dare commit to the reduction in quality of life that stopping all oil and gas development, and all industry that depends on reliable energy, would inevitably entail. The entire debate is a charade. We know it, and the politicians squirming to be front-of-the-line virtuous on this issue know it, too.
Now back to the leaders’ debate. How can there be a national consideration of climate change when Albertan interests, Newfoundland’s interests, and all the interests of those whose work and life revolve around ready energy supply, are not equally represented with those promising to “transition to net emission-free” energy by 2050 (a fantastical, impossible target). Translated, what that commitment amounts to is a pledge to change Canada’s entire industrial and domestic energy base in 30 years. It is a pledge to shut down the central economic base of at least two provinces. It is putting the whole province of Alberta on notice that “we’re shutting you down.”
Is this not a question that deserves its own debate, in the province most to be affected?” If all the leaders so invested in climate change believe what they are saying, should they not at least leave Ottawa and go out to the province they intend to shut down and hear from the people there? If there are two “national” debates for, and held in, Quebec, should there not be at least one for, and held in, Alberta? I would like to hear one good reason — good, I said — why there cannot.
Similarly for the North and all of the particular, endemic concerns of Canada’s northern peoples. Why not an all leaders’ debate in Whitehorse? Why not more than one held in primarily rural areas, in front of loggers or farmers or fishermen? British Columbia has a dynamic and diverse political culture. Why should we discuss, or more accurately skip over, British Columbia’s interests from within a museum in Ottawa?
I could go on (except I have a wise editor) but I’ll summarize the points. Monday night’s debate was not a debate. It was tokenism, and pretty feeble tokenism at that. The issues of this vast and highly differentiated country cannot be shoehorned into a two-hour shout fest, chopped down to 40-second nuggets, in front of a very select audience in no way representative of the nature of our country.
Leaders have weeks in a national campaign. There is no reason why, with all their various stops, each leader and each party could not put in a debate a week in all the country’s regions. No reason why they should not face the people who they are talking about. Calgary, Vancouver and St. John’s have as much claim on their presence as Ottawa or Montreal. And the rural areas of this country have as much claim as Calgary, Vancouver and St. John’s.
The reason we do not have these debates is that each party and each leader wishes to reduce their risks and stay away from any venue not organized and controlled by their campaign teams. To pretend what we saw last night was in any real sense a “national” debate is laughable. It was neither national, nor a debate.
nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/rex-murphy-that-wasnt-a-debate-nor-was-it-national-it-was-tokenism-and-feeble-at-that
2 French debates and an English debate pretty much about South and South East Ontario and Quebec what a sham
While I normally think that Rex is spot-on with his assessment of things, I have one issue here with him. He stated that Bernier should not have been there because the PPC is a fringe party. Fine, but based on that criteria, so are the Greens. The PPC has only 1 seat in the House while the Greens only have two. If you're going to let May take part in the debates, you pretty much have to let Bernier take part as well.
The two French Language debates are for Quebec in Quebec, but didn't the one English debate that Trudeau showed up for also take place in Quebec? In Gatineau Quebec specifically? That equates to Justin Trudeau only showing up for Quebec debates and skipping all others....