Frank Graves, the pollster, wasted no time in rendering his verdict. Three minutes after the charade ended, Graves tweeted: “OMG, is it over? … It was a meaningless waste of time. Possibly the most vacuous and tedious debate in Canadian political history.”
Sorry, Frank, but aren’t you gilding the lily? That English-language debate on Thursday night was worse than that. It was ghastly, an embarrassment, an insult to the intelligence of Canadians, and a disservice to voters who hoped to learn something useful about the five leaders and the issues in next Monday’s election.
What they got was a poorly conceived debate, stupidly structured, badly organized, and ineptly directed by a moderator who behaved as though she was a sixth debater instead of a neutral referee.
They also got the spectacle of an irritated prime minister struggling to get in a few words of his own while fighting off four attackers, all clubbing him less for his performance and his policies than for his calling of the snap election – a hugely unpopular decision for which the Liberals had already paid a steep price in public support during the campaign’s first three weeks.
There being no such thing as a dead horse in an election, the attackers kept beating it enthusiastically for the edification of the television audience. I found myself wondering whether the opposition party leaders had given any thought to how their four-way assault might be perceived by ordinary voters at home. It produced an image in my mind of a guy being mugged in an alley by four thugs.
Many Canadians cannot abide Justin Trudeau. It’s visceral. Many will never vote for him and his Liberals. I could be wrong, but I think most Canadians still have enough respect for the office of prime minister to be distressed when Trump-style extremists invade Trudeau’s election rallies, scream profanities at him, cry that he be locked up or lynched, and pelt him with little stones. Our Canadian mothers raised us to be better than this. And as our American neighbours learned, it’s a small step from stones to rocks, from vile profanity to physical violence, from demonstration to insurrection.
If the debate did nothing to lower the temperature, it also failed to offer viewers a fair portrait of the principal leaders. Trudeau looked distressed throughout, back on his heels, his normal articulateness deserting him as he fought off his attackers. Stone-faced Erin O’Toole – the Conservative leader looked at times as though he would like to smile, if only he knew how – repeatedly diverted questions about contradictions and inconsistencies in his policies into attacks on Trudeau for calling the election. NDP leader Jasmeet Singh looked out of sync. It wasn’t the turban. It was the ill-fitting three-piece suit. He may have wanted to look prime ministerial; he succeeded in looking unfashionably overdressed, compared to the others.
The English debate was a train wreck. The French debate the previous evening was mediocre. Both were the responsibility of Leaders’ Debates Commission, an independent secretariat within the Privy Council Office. Created in 2018, this low-profile outfit is led by a high-profile commissioner, former governor general David Johnston, who was a very good debate moderator in earlier years. The commission’s mandate is to organize two debates per federal election, one in each official language, decide which leaders qualify to participate, and hire a debate producer.
The grittier details, including the format and selection of a moderator, are largely left to the broadcasters who air the debates. There is recurring tension between the commission, which wants the debates to be informative, and the broadcasters, who want them to be entertaining – short segments with enough conflict and testy argument to keep viewers’ fingers away from the remote.
There are significant differences between Trudeau’s Liberals and O’Toole’s Conservatives in this close election. Televised debates are an important way for voters to evaluate the differences. The debates commission and its broadcasting partners both failed Canadians this fall.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. His new book, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World, co-authored with the late Flora MacDonald, is being published next month by McGill-Queen’s University Press. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com.