Now that Jagmeet Singh has ended the NDP’s Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Liberals, raising the prospect of a federal election happening sooner rather than later, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre should move immediately to declare that he will not take part in debates organized by the Leaders’ Debates Commission.

The Trudeau government-conceived, funded, and appointed commission, which included David Johnston as its inaugural commissioner, should have died a quiet death after the 2021 federal vote, when it organised, for the second federal election in a row, two disastrous leaders debates.

By stating now that he will boycott commission-sanctioned debates, Mr. Poilievre can perform a lasting public service for himself, his party, and Canadians.

First, his refusal to participate in the bureaucrat-coordinated, taxpayer-funded debates would be a principled stand against the relentless intrusion of the state into the writ period.

Canada has some of the most “state-involved” federal elections in the Western world. Individuals are limited to $1,725 in annual donations to political parties. Corporate and union contributions are banned. Third-party spending is curtailed to the point it arguably limits free speech rights. The Parliamentary Budget Office costs political parties’ platforms. And the news media receives hundreds of millions in government subsidies to cover politics and elections.

The very existence of a government debates commission, created by the incumbent party and prime minister, is simply the latest and arguably one of the most egregious examples of “state-sanctioned” election interference. It runs counter to the rough and tumble origins of our once vibrant Canadian democracy, where civil society and citizens—not the state—make the important decisions about elections and how they are conducted.

The second service Mr. Poilievre’s early rejection of the commission’s debates would do is increase the likelihood of ending what is surely a case study for how to undertake an unnecessary and costly government expenditure, with little or no public benefit.

Before the next federal vote, the Commission appears on track to spend some $10,000,000 in public funds on two elections’ worth of leaders’ debates. These are debates which Globe columnist Andrew Coyne charitably characterized as an “utter, toe-curling embarrassment”, with the 2019 English debate featuring a whopping five moderators.  Recall that before the Commission’s creation in 2018, election debates were produced and paid for by the “consortium”, the Orwellian name for the group of broadcasters (CBC, CTV, Global) that opaquely organized federal election debates for going on a generation. Absent Mr. Poilievre’s intervention, Canadians can relish the prospect of the next election featuring more abysmal debates paid for by taxpayers and produced by the same broadcasters who botched the job not once but twice in 2019 and 2021.

The third and perhaps most important contribution Mr. Poilievre could make by spurning the commission in no uncertain terms is to recreate the conditions that lead to a brief renaissance of quality leaders’ debates we witnessed during the 2015 federal election.

That year, Conservative leader Stephen Harper made the bold move of announcing that he would not participate in debates organized by the broadcasters.

As a result of Harper’s principled decision and his subsequent openness to a variety of debate invitations, Canadians were treated to more leaders’ debates in different formats during the 2015 election than at any time in our modern political history.

There were debates dedicated solely to the economy and foreign policy (yours truly moderated the latter), debates by local broadcasters and newspapers, the first-ever bilingual debate, and debates held in front of live audiences of thousands of people. Debates took place not only in Ontario and Quebec (gasp!) but also in important regional centres like Calgary. In short, it was wall-to-wall debates for six marvellous weeks.

The knock on the 2015 election debates were their smaller television audiences. Indeed, the not insignificant decline in viewership was the primary justification used by the Trudeau government to create a state commission to fund and organise debates in 2018.

The reality was the lower viewership stemmed directly from the broadcasters boycotting most of the 2015 debates. The self-serving reason provided at the time was that the “consortium” could not show debates on their airwaves that they hadn’t produced. This despite that broadcasters are CRTC mandated to “inform Canadians about the issues, political parties and candidates involved [in federal elections].”

Fast-forward to 2024, and the profusion of non-broadcaster-controlled live video platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch), and there is no reason to think debates produced by groups other than CBC, CTV, Global, and RDI can’t attract large viewing audiences. One might also hope that the now diminished broadcasters, serially dependent on various government subsidies, might actually choose to live up to their regulatory responsibilities during elections to “inform Canadians” and show third-party leaders debates.

So, Mr. Poilievre the ball is in your court. You have a golden opportunity to move now and declare like Stephen Harper in 2015 your principled non-participation in today’s utterly broken and wasteful model of state-funded leaders debates. By doing so, you stand a good chance of preemptively putting the shambolic Leaders’ Debates Commission out of its misery, just as Harper did for the broadcasters and their cartel-like “debate consortium.”

And who knows? In place of the commission, voters might enjoy a repeat of the 2015 campaign, with a variety of debates organized by different groups on different topics, using different formats and locations—all spontaneously arranged by civil society, not the government, to the benefit of voters, democracy, and free speech. Now that would be something to see.

A majority of Canadians think that Canada is broken after years of stagnant incomes, affordability challenges, rising crime, government failures on basic functions like healthcare and immigration, and a deepening cultural malaise. But decline is a choice, and better public policies are needed to overcome Canada’s many challenges. Kickstart Canada brings together leading voices in academia, think tanks, and business to lay out an optimistic vision for Canada’s future, providing the policy ideas that governments need to ensure a bright future for all Canadians.

Canadian climate policy is struggling.

We are not on track to achieve our climate targets. The federal government is locked in a battle with provinces over its ever-proliferating suite of laws and regulations aimed at curbing emissions. Companies that want to decarbonize can’t tell which direction this tug-of-war is going to go from one day to the next. Meanwhile, the uncertainty is holding up billions in new low-carbon investments.

Canadians are divided on what we should be doing about the climate—and increasingly, on whether we should be doing anything at all. That’s bad news, because building a low-carbon Canadian economy is a generational opportunity we need to seize now to secure our future prosperity.

Ambivalence about climate policy is understandable, especially because Canadians are struggling against a rising cost of living. Many perceive the fight against climate change as unnecessarily burdensome. But, climate change itself is already contributing to rising costs, and low-carbon economic growth offers an antidote.

While Canadian action alone can’t stop climate change,  we have to be part of the solution or risk becoming globally isolated, both politically and economically.

We have the tools we need to make climate policy work for Canada. We need to start using those tools in a way that is more consistent with the blueprints of Canadian federalism.

Take carbon pricing. Since 2018, Ottawa has set minimum standards for provinces to design and run their own carbon pricing systems. The federal government only imposes its own system on provinces that don’t meet the standard.

Carbon pricing could have been the “cornerstone” of a low-rise federal climate policy that respected provincial jurisdiction. Instead, the federal government decided to build a skyscraper of other policies on top of it. Now the top floors are teetering, putting the whole structure at risk.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As Hub Editor-at-Large Sean Speer has argued, we need Ottawa to disentangle itself from the provincial responsibilities it has assumed in defiance of Canada’s clearly-defined constitutional separation of powers. That should include the nitty-gritty of how to achieve low-carbon growth and hit climate targets. Provinces are best positioned to figure that out for themselves. The federal government’s role should be to hold them to account.

There’s an opportunity here for the provinces and the feds to reach a new understanding on how to work together to grow Canada’s low-carbon economy and reduce emissions.

The federal government should commit to withdrawing contentious climate policy proposals that intrude on areas of provincial responsibility, like the oil and gas emissions cap. Not only would this demonstrate respect for the jurisdiction of provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan, but it would make room for industrial carbon pricing to work its magic instead of hamstringing it. Layering policies on top of each other just creates more complexity and uncertainty and slows down low-carbon investment.

However, provinces shouldn’t expect to get something for nothing. While withdrawing from areas of provincial jurisdiction, the federal government should double down on its own—enforcing our internationally agreed emissions reduction targets. Provinces should be free to chart their own courses to emissions reduction and low-carbon growth, but they have to show that they’re making tangible progress. Otherwise, Ottawa needs to step in.

In order to hold provinces accountable, it would help if we could all agree on the implications of their climate plans—or at least be able to talk about what we disagree on. Right now we can’t, because we lack a transparent system for modelling climate plans. Each level of government does its own policy modelling. Nobody else can see the inputs and assumptions. That needs to change.

Holding provinces to account doesn’t mean stepping on their toes. Each region is unique, and Ottawa should not presume to understand provincial realities better than the provinces themselves. Whether it’s housing, child care, or carbon emissions, the federal government’s role is to ensure provinces achieve nationally equivalent outcomes.

As Heather Exner-Pirot argued earlier in this series, Alberta in particular has designed an effective program to foster low-carbon growth and reduce emissions that is not only fine-tuned to the needs of the province, but has also helped inspire the federal government’s own industrial carbon pricing system. The Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) system can continue to drive billions of dollars worth of low-carbon investment in Canada’s highest-emitting province and help the province compete internationally. In fact TIER and other provincial industrial carbon pricing systems are expected to make the largest contribution to reducing Canada’s emissions.

But TIER faces challenges. The TIER carbon market risks an oversupply of credits, which could hurt credit prices and undermine the business case for new low-carbon investment in the province. The federal government needs to work with Alberta to address this, among other issues.

If the federal government and the provinces can build up enough trust to work together constructively on climate policy, then we might be able to take industrial carbon pricing to the next level—such as creating a harmonized national carbon market to accelerate investment. That’s not something the federal government can impose on the provinces; they’ll need to be enthusiastic participants.

To get where we need to go—a low-carbon Canadian economy that can sustain prosperity for future generations and protect our way of life—the federal government needs to get back in its lane, and out of the provinces’ business.