More election debates better for democracy; journalism professor
Posted Mar 31, 2011 7:29 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
There are suggestions that Canadians need more leaders’ debates during a federal election campaign.
The first thing that needs to happen, according to Carleton University Communications and Journalism Professor Paul Adams, is to take away the power from the TV networks.
“This has become part of our democratic process and it shouldn’t be up to the CBC and CTV and so on to decide how the debates are structured and who gets into them,” Adams said.
He also says an independent body should be created to handle these events. Not only that, but Adams asks why it is all left to one big showdown for every election.
He believes Canadians would benefit from seeing a number of debates, one with all the leaders and then individual one-on-one debates within the top four.
”Ideally, we’d have debates organized by some non-partisan commission, and we would have something like four debates over the course of the campaign, and each would be structured differently,” he said. “You’d have a variety of formats so that people could see [the] leaders in different kinds of circumstances.”
Adams says the bottom line is this: the more debates Canadian leaders have, the better it will be for voters because they can see which politicians really can duke it out in the ring.
