Getting the Debates Right – Next Time

If there's any consensus over the election debates, it's that they need to be changed. We heartily suggest they start with the set.

With the French debate wrapped up, columnists are lining up to tell the broadcast consortium to give Gilles Duceppe the Green party treatment by barring the Bloc Québécois from the English one next time around. “Even Canadian politeness should have limits,” writes Don MacPherson in the Montreal Gazette, suggesting that Duceppe abused his spot in the first debate to simply prepare for the second. “The Bloc does not run candidates in English Canada, and scarcely bothers to campaign in English in Quebec, where almost all its campaign material is in French only,” MacPherson says, terming the Bloc's inclusion on Tuesday night “a waste of everybody else's time.”

The National Post's Chris Selley disagrees entirely, because barring Duceppe from the English debate would only reinforce the age-old notion of Canada's two solitudes: “It would say there are Quebec issues, and then Rest of Canada issues. Even cranky 'let the bastards seperate' types don't think Quebec's irrelevant, or they wouldn't hold that opinion.” But Selley also offers a quick fix to the staggeringly Quebec-centric focus of the second debate, where questions abounded over the Champlain Bridge and French-in-the-workplace laws: "The easy solution is to abandon the linguistic split. We're a bilingual country, so let's have bilingual, instantaneously translated debates.” Plus, Duceppe is the only leader who can be counted on to inject any humour into the otherwise staid affairs.

Meanwhile, with all the debate bluster wrapped up and the campaigns now half over, Haroon Siddiqui, writing in the Toronto Star, argues that the $300-million pricetag attached to the election has already been more than worth it. “An election being an MRI of our body politic, this campaign has already exposed more issues and personalities in two weeks than months of routine parliamentary proceedings in Ottawa could have,” says Siddiqui. Voters have finally been exposed enough to the leaders' competing views, and with their contrasts (or lack thereof) brought into sharper focus by the debates, “Canadians can now judge for themselves how accurate the opposition has been about Stephen Harper.”