‘The Arguments for Including Elizabeth May are Just Plain Silly’

The debate about the debate rages on.

The National Post’s Lorne Gunter declares that there’s no basis to include Green party Leader Elizabeth May in the election debates. “Most of the arguments for including Ms. May are just plain silly,” he says. The media consortium has clear criteria stipulating participants must have a seat in Parliament, and although the Green party’s 938,000 votes in the last election would have won her a seat if Canada had a system of proportional representation, the fact is we don’t have such a system. That's fair, but if the criterion for participating in the debates is winning a seat, why are sitting independent MPs André Arthur and Helena Guergis being excluded? Because they don’t have a national organization, of course, which May does. So ... what’s the criteria again?

In the Globe and Mail, May herself issues a cri de coeur and promises, “This decision will not stand. It is anti-democratic and Canadians will make their views on this abundantly clear.” She charges that the media consortium is “interfering in democracy by dictating what choices are worth making.” But surely someone needs to decide who gets into the debates. There are at least 18 parties running in this election, and someone needs to tell the Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party that it's not getting on TV. That doesn’t necessarily mean May should not make the cut, but her argument that the media are stifling choice by limiting debate participation doesn’t ring true.

In his Maclean’s blog, Andrew Potter wonders why May wants to participate in the debates in the first place, considering what a shoddy excuse for a democratic exercise they are. All the things we supposedly hate about political culture are on full display during such events, including “the scripted way in which politicians stick to their talking points, … the hyper-partisanship, [and] the casual character assassination.” Potter suggests the debates either be abolished or reformatted to include cabinet ministers and critics instead of party leaders. He believes this would “help reduce the ‘winner-take-all’ character of the current debates” and “rehabilitate the principle of cabinet government.” Maybe, but who would watch?