Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members.
For most Canadians, leaders' debates are as much a part of the election routine as lawn signs and paper ballots. Few likely give a thought to how precarious this important political tradition is.
Canadians have watched debates among party leaders in every federal election since 1968. These debates have provided voters with what might be called a third window on the election campaigns. The first window consists of party advertising mainly on television, although also increasingly now on social media. These ads are generally short, partial, and often negative. As I'm sure you will agree, at least with regard to your opponents' ads, some are even a little misleading. The second window is through the media. The media are changing, of course, but the so-called mainstream media continue to dominate. Their ability to connect voters to the political discourse is vital, as is their commentary and analysis.
As a former political reporter with both the CBC and the Globe up here on the Hill, and since 2005 a professor of journalism at Carleton, I can tell you that news coverage in elections, like any other news, is driven by what we call news values. These are not values in the moral sense. They are rules of thumb we use to determine what is newsworthy and what isn't. Two core news values are conflict and novelty. If there is conflict, if there is something new, then that makes the news. If there is not, it's harder to grab the media's attention and harder to get the public's attention. I think you'll agree with me, though, that neither conflict nor novelty are necessarily values that voters need in the course of an election campaign.
For much of my career, my view through this third window of the leadership debates was from the media room outside the hall where the debate was taking place. As I wrote my stories, I was guided by the search for conflict and novelty. Though I did strive to do better than that—I hope I sometimes succeeded—the fact is that news is news. When I left the news business and started watching the debates from the couch, with my wife by my side, I noticed something interesting. Often just when I got fidgety because I had heard it all before, my wife started getting interested. She was getting unmediated access to the leaders. She was getting context. She was hearing them describe their views at length in a way she wasn't getting from news clips. Usually it was the first time in the course of the campaign she got any of that.
There was something else I noticed. Often the zingers, the so-called knockout punches that caught my ears, had the opposite effect on her. She wasn't interested in the fist fight that reporters record and partisans cheer on. She was interested in the information as well as the glimpses into the characters of the candidates. It was helping her make up her mind.
For millions of Canadians, these debates are the central event of the campaign, the only time they sit down for two or three hours straight and concentrate on it. Then, at the coffee shop the next day, or on social media, or at Sunday dinner, they talk it through, based on their shared experiences with colleagues, friends, and families. Once again, Canadians have no idea how precarious this important tradition of leadership debates is.
For most of their history, the debates have been organized by a consortium of Canada's major broadcasters negotiating directly with the political parties. Naturally, and perfectly reasonably, during these negotiations the parties sought their partisan advantage in terms of the number of debates, their format, the subjects they would cover, and who would participate. Everybody understands that. Less well understood is that the broadcasters brought all kinds of self-interest of their own to the table. They didn't want the debates to pre-empt hockey games or revenue-producing American comedies and cop shows. They wanted to showcase their network stars. And because these debates would be on their networks, they wanted them to be good TV shows, meaning that conflict and novelty were values that to some degree they were interested in encouraging. They said they represented the public interest, but that was never completely true.
In the last election, Stephen Harper, for perhaps understandable reasons, tried to free himself from the shackles of the consortium. Instead, we ended up with a series of debates following different, uncoordinated formats at more or less arbitrary times.
There was something to be said for allowing 100 flowers to bloom, but we know for a fact that the voters were not as well served. The most watched debate was organized by Maclean'sbefore the writ was even dropped, and it had fewer than 40% of the number of viewers attracted to the 2011 English-language debate organized by the consortium.
Voters were denied the shared experience of a debate on the major networks in the late weeks of the campaign when many of them were finally making up their minds. It's time to institutionalize these debates that are so important to so many voters, just as we have made rules for spending, fundraising, advertising, and many other aspects of our campaigns. The debates should be organized by a body independent of the interests of either the parties or the networks. They should be organized in the public interest, in other words. That body could be Elections Canada or some stand-alone commission.
The aim of the debates should be to elicit information from the candidates while also providing significant interactions among them, with the understanding that there is no perfect format, and none will ever be entirely free from criticism.
The networks that enjoy the privilege—the very lucrative privilege—of access to our airwaves should be required to run the debates as the commission directs as a condition of licence. Party leaders, when they are invited, should be expected to show up. I would suggest some penalty if they do not, a substantial but not debilitating penalty, perhaps a period of several days during which that leader's party could not broadcast advertising.
Voters have come to expect and depend on their third window in the election, and we should make sure they have it.
Thank you very much.