On April 16th and April 17th, the only scheduled federal election debates were held among the Liberal, Conservative, New Democratic, and Bloc Québécois party leaders. The first night was the French debate. The second was the English debate.
There were no knockout blows nor any fireworks in either debate.
However, although the debates themselves were well organized and particularly well moderated, some of the “media” given entry by the debate organizer – the Leaders Debate Commission – caused considerable controversy and fireworks around the proceedings. This was the real news story.
The Commission began the morning of the first debate, the French one, by summarily dropping the Green Party from both debates with only a few hours’ notice. They had previously approved participation by the Greens but now said that the Greens had strategically dropped some candidates and were no longer running enough contenders to meet the criteria to join the debate.
While the Commission may have been technically accurate, they were certainly wrong in waiting until the morning of the first debate to announce that decision. Any issue they had with the Greens could have and should have been addressed days earlier.
The decision to drop the Greens also raised the question for many about why the Bloc Québécois was participating, particularly in the English debate, given that they only run candidates in a single province.
It soon became apparent that poor decisions by the Debate Commission would cause even more problems. Both debates were of course covered by media from across the country and the Commission had set up ‘scrums’ after each debate to give reporters a chance to question each leader about their debate statements and experience. As is the norm, all media reps were accredited prior to the event. Outlets were each restricted to one reporter asking questions during the post-debate media availability.
Accredited media were soon shocked to discover that five alt-right so-called journalists from Rebel News had also been accredited and would each be allowed to ask a question. This led to accreditation for alt-right outlets True North and Juno News. These organizations are notoriously biased and are the farthest thing possible from news outlets. They are not neutral by any stretch of the imagination and frequently insert themselves into the story. True journalists are trained to be neutral and to never make themselves part of the story.
The alt-right outlets dominated the first scrum, to quote Canadian Dimension, making “long-winded accusatory statements that often bore little resemblance to coherent questions.” They lobbed knucklehead queries at leaders about culture war topics such as trans women in sports, residential school denialism, and whether Canada would start deporting non-citizens for protesting at pro-Palestinian rallies.
Carney and Blanchet mostly dodged the verbal assault. Poilievre was given an easy time. It was only Singh who commendably refused to answer any of their questions on principle, saying they just promote hate and disinformation.
As time was limited, actual reporters were able to ask few questions. None of the questions went to Canadian newspapers.
The situation got worse the next day. Commission executive director Michel Cormier tried in vain to justify why Rebel News had been allowed to participate. The gist of his explanation was that in 2019 and 2021, Rebel News had sued for accreditation to cover those election debates and had won in court.
Cormier said that this year, the Commission had been advised they would not win another court challenge and had decided not to take on another legal battle on the issue. That rationale did not explain why the Commission had accredited five people. It was later reported in The Tyee that Rebel News leader Ezra Levant had once again legally threatened the Commission, arguing there should be no restrictions on the number of journalists they could send.
And then, worse, when Cormier was asked during an interview with David Cochrane on CBC’s Power and Politics if he was aware that Rebel News had registered with Elections Canada as a third-party advocacy group — which completely proved that they were not neutral journalists – he admitted that the Commission did not know that and hadn’t checked. Had the commission rejected Rebel News and Rebel News had gone to court again, they would almost certainly have lost their court application given the fact that they had registered with Elections Canada as a third party advocacy group.
Real journalists understand that it is impossible to be both lobbyists registered with Elections Canada and journalists at the same time.
The alt-right’s so-called journalists seemed to take their impact from the day before as a license to cause further mayhem. They began provoking physical altercations with mainstream journalists.
During the lead-up time to the debate, they had a number of altercations with mainstream staff and reporters, including freelancer Justin Ling, Stu Benson, a journalist for The Hill Times, and CBC’s Rosemary Barton. The situation got so heated that the RCMP was called to intervene. At some point, Levant even tried to crash a live CBC Power and Politics broadcast, which forced the program off the air for a short time.
The situation became so unsafe for journalists, and potentially for the party leaders, that the Debate Commission was forced to cancel the scheduled post-debate scrum. As CBC presenters explained during their post-debate broadcast, Montreal police continued to be stationed within the secure debate area to ensure security.
All of this leads to one question – when will the leaders of all of the other federal parties follow in the footsteps of Jagmeet Singh and refuse to take questions from these deranged and harmful right-wing disseminators of hatred, misinformation, and discrimination?
These groups are nothing but rage farmers.
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (April 22, 2025): 430.46ppm
One year ago (April 25, 2024): 428.19ppm
Subscribe to Tim Louis
Keep up to date Tim's latest posts.