Thank you.
I'm going to take a page out of David Christopherson's book because I love him, although he will not love what I have to say.
I'm going to quickly set out that I'm enormously grateful that the government has taken the bull by the horns and set a debates commission process with firm criteria in advance, because I think we're debating this.... There's no question that it would be much better if all parties.... I'd take out the words “all recognized parties” because the recognized parties, frankly, have been manipulating the debates process for years to exclude anyone but the recognized parties.
There's no ill intention toward you, darling, but honestly, the debates process is one that, viewed by any impartial observer, brings democracy into disrepute.
You have collusion and backroom dealings. The media consortium worked so hard, but not only did they have Mr. Harper threatening not to participate in debates, but the last time around both Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Harper got the English language leaders debate cancelled. So 11 million Canadians who watched the simultaneous English-language leaders debate in 2011 were deprived of that opportunity in 2015, and also the women's debate. Then we had this scattering of other debates, which I believe were put in place specifically to draw attention away from the fact that we'd just lost the nationally broadcast English-language leaders debate.
The problem is that we're looking at this process and saying it's flawed, and I won't say it's perfect, but in comparison to the status quo, it's a huge improvement. I'll give you two reasons why, and for supporting documentation one could look up the article that Tony Burman wrote. He had been chair of the consortium with CBC during the 2008 leaders debate and wrote about how fraught it was, how anti-democratic, how absurd it was to have all this behind closed doors with the threats from different leaders. Also, Andrew Coyne has written very brilliantly on the problem. Andrew Coyne's analogy is that it's like Chrysler, GM and Ford getting together with the TV networks and saying, “Okay, we all agree: no TV ads for Toyota.”
That's how unfair, indiscriminate and anti-democratic it has been until now. I do sense that there's a lot of effort to discredit this effort being made from the very same people who never wanted to see it broadened beyond the large parties.
So I wanted to be very, very up front in saying I welcome this effort. One of the key benefits is that, when the media consortium had the fairly thankless task—and I don't blame the media consortium for any of this.... But the problem is that, when the media news directors are making a key decision for democracy, their own reporters have a very difficult time reporting on what's going on. In fact, they can't.
My hope is that with an independent debates commission, with a qualified debates commissioner, with transparency, the news media won't be shut out from reporting on what's going on, because as far as I recall, there was never a news story in the 2015 election about how interesting it was that two federal party leaders—one of them the standing prime minister—had managed to get the debates cancelled.
Let me say that I welcome a predictable, transparent process on which the media can be informed to report on what's happening. I see the biggest risk here—before I move to your qualifications, sir—being a lack of sufficient buy-in from the larger parties and a lack of sufficient buy-in from the consortium members.
My advice, humbly, respectfully submitted, is that you have seven positions for an advisory board and you should fill them with CTV, CBC, Global, TVA and Radio-Canada—they ran the debates from the 1960s until now—and I would add TVO and CPAC. Let those be your advisers, because as soon as possible, we need their commitment that they will broadcast. There's no commitment now to broadcast the debates that the debate commission produces, and that needs to be very clear early on.
I welcome this. I say hallelujah to the criteria because they work for the Bloc Québécois; they work in fairness for parties like mine, and I think they'll probably end up working for Max Bernier and the People's Party, but we shall see.
I would ask you just one question, if you'd like to reflect on it. In your long and illustrious career, you haven't mentioned one particular role you had that I think has application to this, and that's when you were the founding chair of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy from 1988 to 1990, with lots of disparate groups and multi-stakeholder engagement. Do you think that has any application to the new role that I hope you will be assuming?
Thank you.