If there is one thing Canadians agree on after this election, let it be this: government-organised leaders’ debates should be abolished.
Regular readers of The Hub will know that I am not a fan of the Trudeau government’s created and funded Leaders’ Debate Commission.
As I have written here, here, and here, I believe the Commission was and has always been a misguided solution in search of a non-existent problem.
It took something that had been successfully organized for decades by broadcasters, newspapers, and civil society groups (e.g., leaders’ debates) and turned it into an expensive, bureaucratic, and demonstrably underwhelming government exercise in busy work.
The Commission has spent over $10 million to organise debates during the 2019 and 2021 writ periods (and now the 2025 federal election) that were universally panned as everything from an “insult to viewers and voters” to “a farce” to “embarrassing failures” to “just lousy debate.”
If its record of debate malpractice wasn’t bad enough, the Commission has now scored an own goal of epic proportions by flip-flopping on the Green Party’s participation in this week’s debates. In doing so, it has called into question not only its institutional legitimacy through the arbitrariness of its own rules and decision-making, but also this election’s two debates.
This sorry tale of government incompetence goes something like this.
The Trudeau government, early in its first mandate, created out of whole cloth both the Commission and the criteria by which parties and their leaders would be included (or not) in federal election debates.
Specifically, Katrina Gould, the then minister of Democratic Institutions, decided, unilaterally, to set a very low bar for inclusion that stands to this day. To get on the debate stage, all a party had to do was meet two of three criteria: be represented in the House of Commons or have “a level of national support of at least 4 percent” as measured by polling or have candidates nominated to run in 90 percent of federal ridings.
And here we get to the rub of the Commission’s rules: the low bar to participate was highly convenient for the Trudeau government. Not knowing its political future, it understandably wanted fewer, not more, debates.
The 2015 election, after all, had featured half a dozen debates, organised by different groups, all paid for privately, with some on specific topics like the economy and foreign policy, each featuring different combinations of leaders.
In creating the Commission, the Trudeau government was explicit that it was solving for the debate “chaos” of the 2015 campaign by ensuring that there would be only two debates going forward, and each would have as many leaders on stage as reasonably could be accommodated by a priori rule-making.
In short, the Commission landed on a frequency and style for debates perfect for an incumbent PM, and his natural governing party, keen on avoiding the risks of a kind of Turner-Mulroney-style moment inherent to having more and different debates, such as the Munk Debates and the Globe and Mail events and their three-on-three formats.
The political skullduggery that lies at the heart of the Commission’s creation in 2019 is what has now karmically hoisted it by its own petard.
The Greens should never have been part of the 2025 election debates, or for that matter the Commission’s 2019 and 2021 contests. They are a marginal party in and outside Parliament and a distraction for voters on the debate stage.
But due to the Commission’s own lax and politically motivated rules, they had to include them, and hence the formal invitation. Their decision seems to have rested entirely on taking the Greens’ word that they had the requisite “endorsed” candidates, despite Elections Canada having no indication of such. They reaffirmed this judgement as recently as yesterday in an email to the CBC in light of news reports that the Greens had decided, in recent weeks, to pull up to 100 candidates from ridings where their vote could harm the incumbent Liberals.
In a sudden reversal today that is upending the campaigns’ debate planning, the Commission (which is currently operating without a duly appointed head) disinvited the Greens from its debates by creating a new rule overnight.
It now seems that a political party that is “…reducing the number of candidates running for strategic reasons…” is ineligible to take part in election debates. News certainly to the Greens and news to everyone since no such rule exists on the Commission’s website or in its original Orders in Council.
The extent and portent of this flip-flop are striking. Here we have a government body interpreting and re-interpreting its rules seemingly on the fly to literally “set the stage” for two highly consequential debates in a highly consequential election, on the same day that both contests are set to get underway.
Put another way, Canadians are yet again being treated by the Commission to an object lesson in how overweening government ultimately screws everything up while affording taxpayers the luxury of footing the bill.
So again, if there is any consensus coming out of the 2025 federal election, let us agree it is to end, once and for all, these plenteous, incompetent, and unnecessary government-sanctioned debates. Instead, let us return to the decades-long tradition of self-organizing our debates through the media, paid for privately, all without any state intervention or control. That would be progress that everyone could get behind, regardless of political stripe.
Rudyard Griffiths is the publisher of The Hub.
