I get to do this because I was intimately involved in negotiating the debates, especially the French one.
The 2015 election debate context was a strange one indeed. There was no national televised debate in English because one of the parties declined to participate. In French, there was a national debate with all the major party leaders but without the participation of one of the two major television networks. I'll come back to the French debate later.
There is a point of view that the reason the debate negotiations failed is because the consortium model is a failed one. That broadcast executives negotiating behind closed doors with party representatives is undemocratic, that debate rules and parameters set by journalists may serve the interests of television but not political debate.
While we agree that the process has to evolve, let me inject some nuance into this argument by revisiting what happened.
The English debate did not happen because the whole negotiation process was highly politicized. From the early spring of 2015, when we made our first approach to the parties, to the dying days of the campaign, when we still held out hope for a debate, we could not get a commitment from the party in power to participate. The misgivings were not about inclusion or the use of social media or format or content, they were about the consortium itself.
We have always been open to widely distribute the debate and were already in discussions with Google and Facebook to increase its reach on digital platforms. Essentially, as long as the consortium was involved in the exercise—