Chris Selley: Abolish the Leaders' Debates Commission, salt the earth

The Leaders’ Debates Commission clawed back some basic semblance of self-respect on Wednesday morning when it disinvited the Green Party from this evening’s French-language debate and tomorrow’s English-language follow-up. The party has only nominated 232 candidates across the country, or 69 per cent of the total number of ridings, whereas one of the three rules for a party’s inclusion (you need to satisfy two) demands that, “28 days before the date of the general election, the party has endorsed candidates in at least 90 per cent of federal ridings.” And then it gave back all that self-respect with interest: Journalist Justin Ling reports for the Toronto Star that while limiting other media outlets to one journalist each at post-debate scrums with the leaders, Ezra Levant’s online Rebel News site managed to strong-arm the commission into granting his outlet five spots. Whatever you think of Levant or Rebel News, that’s utterly ridiculous — and guaranteed to incite a riot among competing reporters. The way the rules are phrased , the Greens might actually have a narrow technical case: They did endorse a full slate of candidates, and they provided a list of them to the commission; it’s just that not all of them wound up being officially nominated as candidates. The rules specifically say “parties are not required to demonstrate that those candidates have been formally nominated with Elections Canada.” But this utterly hapless party admitted it had pulled candidates from the running deliberately, so as not to split the progressive vote in the Conservatives’ favour. It pulled a fast one, and deserves to be disinvited on ethical if not procedural grounds — in addition to being all but a total non-factor in Canadian federal politics. (Greens are currently polling around two per cent support nationally , according to the polling aggregator 338Canada.com.) The Greens having been excluded, however, this election is still shaping up as a low point for the commission. For starters, on Tuesday, the French-language debate was moved up by two hours, to 6 p.m. EDT, to avoid conflicting with a Montreal Canadiens game in which they can clinch a playoff spot. The idea, creditable on its face, was to get more eyeballs on the debate. But there are two problems with that. One, the debate is two hours long . The Habs game starts at 7 p.m. EDT, midway through the debate. So when it comes to the eyeballs … mission unaccomplished. Two, the rescheduling means the debate starts at 3 p.m. on the West Coast, which is a really silly time to have a national debate. But of course, it’s not really a national debate. This manoeuvre just proves it. We all know that “the French-language debate” is usually just “the Quebec debate.” There’s one debate for the 22 per cent of Canadians who live in Quebec, or rather the minority of that 22 per cent who are consumed by nationalist, linguistic, jurisdictional and sovereigntist angst, who will be represented by Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet. And then there’s one for the 78 per cent of Canadians who don’t live in Quebec and have little time for any of that stuff. Indeed, it’s a very fitting representation of the way Quebec-nationalist elites think about language, and the influence they wield in Ottawa, that we have “a French debate” and “an English debate” in the first place: those elites see bilingualism as a threat to French, whereas the rest of the world sees bilingualism and multilingualism as a benefit on its face. Surely a truly, proudly, functionally bilingual country would have bilingual debates , translated for the unilingual in real time. Having said all that, the English-language debate starts at 4 p.m. PDT on Thursday, which is only 60 minutes less silly a time to broadcast a national debate than the French-language one. On social media, I have seen some defend the rescheduling on grounds that nowadays, people can stream these debates whenever they please online, so the time really doesn’t matter. This is true! But then: Why reschedule for the hockey game? And hang on. Wasn’t the commission created after the 2015 election with the enthusiastic support of people who didn’t like the fact that other organizations (Maclean’s magazine, The Globe and Mail, the Munk Debates and TVA) were hosting their own leaders’ debates and broadcast/streamed them where not every Canadian could supposedly see them? Why yes, yes it was. “It was not always clear to the public where and when they could access the debates since some were carried on a specialty channel or online,” Radio-Canada reported at the time . “(Ryerson University journalism professor David) Nayman asks why Canadians ‘should have to rack their brains’ to find them’.” Again: This was 2015. Not 1995. The internet was quite well established by then. Now we’re supposed to pretend 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. debates, organized by the same old fuddy-duddy broadcasters’ consortium that consistently disappoints Canadians with their product, is the right way forward because people can stream them on the CPAC parliamentary TV channel after the fact — just as they could 10 years ago? Nuts to that. Mr. Carney or Mr. Poilievre, if you seek proper debates in future, tear down this commission. And in the meantime, organize a one-on-one bilingual debate for next week and stream it wherever and whenever you want to. No one can stop you — certainly not this misbegotten commission, which only exists to lend credibility to holding the fewest number of debates imaginable, and in the least imaginative ways. National Post cselley@postmedia.com Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

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