Elizabeth May does not belong in the leader's debate

The Broadcast Consortium that organizes leader’s debates during elections have decided to exclude the Green Party but just as last time Elizabeth May (Green Party leader) is vigorously lobbying for a reversal. She criticizes the Consortium for having a lack of standards and making arbitrary decisions. Though I disagree that the Green Party should be in the debate, I think that this critique of the Consortium is a fair one. They need an objective measure on which to base their decisions. The goal of any objective measure would be to only include the parties that are relevant to law making in the Federal Parliament.

To justify the goal of relevance I will cite the 2008 leader’s debate. It was generally suspected that Ms. May was unlikely to have an impact on policy in the next election. As a result she was a distraction. There is a limited amount of time for leaders to make their arguments and including Ms. May meant that there was even less time for them to do it. That would have been fine if Ms. May’s thoughts on public policy were likely to influence legislation, but they weren’t so it wasn’t.

By the way, the goal of relevance justifies the BQ being in the English debate. As the third largest party (and likely to be the third largest party again) the opinion of the BQ can have an important influence on legislation and so the BQ leader’s opinion could affect our lives. Anglophone voters in Quebec need to hear what the BQ has to offer and Canadians in the rest of Canada should be paying attention as well.

Of course a criticism of my goal of relevance would be that parties like the Green Party will never have a chance to be relevant if they are not included in the leader’s debate. This is simply historically not true. The BQ and the Reform Party were not included in the debate before their breakthrough, yet they were able to win a considerable amount of seats. The leader’s debate is not the sole venue for political parties to engage the public or other parties. The fact that Elizabeth May is able to get coverage without having ever been elected is evidence of that.

So how do we measure the likelihood that a political party would be relevant?

A minimum percentage of support in the polls is not adequate. Polling data is not always accurate, the numbers are constantly changing, and some polls are contradictory. Even if an average of polls were used as a deciding factor it would be difficult to pick when exactly the average should be taken. Should it be an average of all the polls in the election or an average of the polls released the week before the debate?

An alternative, if you want to use popular support as the criteria, would be to use the previous election result. However, popular support does not equate legislative clout in our electoral system and so popular support is not a good indicator of relevance.

The other criterion that is commonly proposed is: if the party has a seat in the House. This fits the relevance goal much better, but still it is faulty. Should a single seat be enough? One MP (or Senator) is not really enough to have an impact on debate in Parliament. Besides if that was the only criteria than Helena Guergis should be allowed in the debate (and wouldn’t that be fun). So the question arises, how many MPs or Senators must a party have before they are considered to have clout in Parliament?

Fortunately that questioned is already answered. The Parliament of Canada has set a threshold on the number of MPs required before they would be recognized as a political party by Parliament (last time I looked that number was 12). This can easily and logically serve as the criteria for the leader’s debate:

Any leader of a political party that is recognized within the Parliament of Canada should be invited to participate in the leader’s debate.