While reading articles about last night’s debate en francais, I note that the Green Party was not invited to participate, I would presume because they hold no seats in Parliament and no official party status. However, I was intrigued to note that polls put their support at about six or seven percent of decided voters.
6-7% is not an insignificant number of voters. Splitting the difference, that is one out of about every 15 voters; assuming the usual turnout, it’s damn close to a million votes. They don’t have a shot in hell of winning anything, but isn’t this a lot of support for a party to have them ignored in the debate?
I believe in the interest of fairness and equal time, the Green Party’s leader, whose leader I believe is Jim Harris, should have been invited to the debate. And the standard disclaimer; I don’t support them and disagree with them on most major issues. But 7% seems too high to me to exclude them.
Also note that the Bloc is only running in Quebec with 75 seats. The Greens are running in 308. That by itself should be enough to earn them a seat at the table.
I agree with you RickJay, while I disagree with almost all of their platform, they should be in these debates.
IMHO, ideally, the leaders of all registered political parties should have been in the debate.
At the very least, the leaders of all registered political parties running a full slate of candidates should have been in the debate.
So what if some of them are nutjobs? If they’re truly wack, they won’t be able to support their platforms and policies and will lose in the debate. No matter what happens, they may bring some new ideas to it.
So yes, definitely, Jim Harris should have been there.
I am about to pull a statisitic out of my ass - pardon me. Perhaps not currently (I don’t know) but at one point the Nazi Party of Canada had support of around 2% of decided voters and they’ve never been invited to a debate either.
At some point a cutoff has to be made, otherwise there would be a Rhino candidate, a Pot candidate, a Nazi candidate, a Bob & Doug’s Groovy Party candidate, etc. The cutoff was set at “At least one seat.”
While I agree that this is unfair to Jim Harris that’s just the way it goes.
I am delighted, however, that during this election each vote for a candiate will garner $1.75 in future campaign $$ for the party - if the Green party gets 5% of the vote in the next election their campaign budget will increase 10 times. I think this will make a very big difference for the future of politics in Canada.
Leaders Parties
Gilles Duceppe Bloc Québécois
Stephen Harper Conservative Party
Jack Layton New Democratic Party
Paul Martin Liberal Party
Other Leaders Independent
Other Registered Parties
CTV at least has the Greens down as a national party. As for Global, well by the time I can figure out their damn web page the election will be over.
There was a similar problem for the Greens in the Ontario election. Again they managed to have a candidate in each riding but were not invited to the debate.
Ultimately it’s a question of what parties have national scope. The Bloc, of course, is its own special problem. If the wackjob parties can field 308 candidates then yes they should be there. If we restrict it to “official parties” or single seat parties we buy into a fixed political system that has too high a barrier for new parties and new ideas.
Somehow I don’t think we had TV debates when there was a Nazi Party of Canada. I don’t believe such a thing exists anymore (in the sense of being a real party running candidates.)
What I am proposing is that the cutoff should have been below the Green Party. They’re a national party running in every riding. Their popular support is very substantial, orders of magnitude more than anything the Rhinoceros Party, Marijuana Party, or any of those joke parties have a prayer of getting. Even five percent of the vote - which would be down from their current standing - is way, way above the level of “fringe party,” ten times above that level.
By way of comparison, if the Green Party gets 5% of the vote, they will get more votes in the election than all the fringe parties got in the 2000 AND 1997 elections combined, including themselves. Here are the percentages those parties got:
1997 Election:
Canadian Action Party: 0.1%
Christian Heritage Party: 0.2%
Marxist-Leninist Party: 0.1%
Natural Law Party: 0.3%
Green Party: 0.4%
Independent and Unaffiliated: 0.5%
2000 Election:
All fringe parties combined: 2.3%
The Green Party’s level of support is way, way beyond fringe party status. Five to seven percent is a LOT. That is why I support their inclusion; they are clearly beyond fringe party support, and into being a significant party. The CBC erred in excluding them.
My position is that at 7% they’re significant enough to merit inclusion.
The line has to be drawn somewhere. I don’t think having to have at least one seat is setting the bar too high.
If the Green’s really are becoming a viable party they should be able to manage that and therefore get themselves a spot in the next election’s debate.
Really? So say an independent forms his/her own party. They should get a national debate seat rather than the party able to achieve 308 candidates? You see no issue with a corporate consortium selecting which of our national parties can be seen in a national debate? There’s no second thought to the potential to freeze out new parties able to meet the organizational challenges inherent in fielding 308 candidates?
If they field 308 candiates, but can’t get one lousy seat, then yes, I have no problem excluding them. It’s not a ‘freeze out’. The Greens just need to win a seat. Is that asking too much?
Clearly the cutoff when a party stops being ‘fringe’ is arbitrary. I think the ability to get a least one seat in the actual election (not an opinion poll) is a reasonable requirement. You can’t please everyone. Set the bar too low and too much debate time is given over to parties without a hope in hell of electing a member.
May I point out that the first past the post nature of Canadian elections works against a linkage between the percentage of public support and number of seats within the House a party can achieve.
Example: 1993 election.
Party %Pop Vote %Seats in House Actual Seats
Liberal 41.3 60 177
Reform 18.7 18 52
Bloc 16 18 54
NDP 6.9 3 9
PC 13.5 1 2
See how the number of actual seats has no bearing on the actual public support a party enjoys? The Reform party achieved slightly more popular support than the PC party yet buried them percentage wise in the House. But for a few votes going the other way you would have denied the PC party a chance to appear in a national debate in the following election.
Well a single independent MP sitting making him/herself a party of 1 having a shot at it seems equally odd don’t you think?
If you can manage recognized party status and field 308 candidates or in the last election garnered >10% of the popular vote candidates in an election you’re in. You may be ignored, you may get fried, but you have the opportunity to present your case to the public.
The fact that corporations make the choice pisses me off to no end.
Well a single independent MP sitting making him/herself a party of 1 having a shot at it seems equally odd don’t you think?
If you can manage recognized party status and field 308 candidates or in the last election you garnered >=10% of the popular vote you’re in. You may be ignored, you may get fried, but you should have the opportunity to present your case to the public.
The fact that corporations make the choice pisses me off to no end.
Certainly. But there’s no reason that the cutoff shouldn’t be both running in most (not necessarily all) ridings and having at least one elected member. And perhaps have some reasonable level of support, too. After all, if John Nunziata had joined the National Law party while he was sitting as an independent, I still don’t think it’s necessary to invite them over to demonstrate yogic flying at the debate. Fortunately, we don’t need to be overly formulaic in the approach, and can simply rely on common sense. So if Jim Pankiw retains his seat and forms a Canadian analogue of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, we can exclude him regardless. And if a party gains a lot of popular support during a term but has no seats, we can question whether they should be included anyways, as we are doing. I’d say the Green Party this year is really right at the borderline, and while I don’t think it would have been a bad idea to include them, I don’t think it’s a travesty not to, either.
My position is that the decision can’t be an arbitrary cutoff, for this exact reason. Only a complete ninny would have left the NDP out of the 1997 debate, because it’s easy to see that even though they only got 6.9% of the tally in 1993, they’re an established national party and that was the absolute low point of their modern history.
There has to be a degree of intelligent decision making here, but the emphasis has to be on hearing, to the greatest possible extent, the voices of the parties that represent Canadians. The Greens represent a LOT of Canadians - hundreds of thousands of them. No fringe party in recent history has had anywhere near the support they hold now. I think the intelligent choice would have been to include the Greens. I agree with Gorsnak that it’s not an absolute outrage they weren’t, but I think it was wrong.
I would like to pitch in and say I would have loved to see the Green Party up there. They have a shot at winning two seats and not letting Canadians see how they fare against other parties is doing a disservice to all Canadians.
In my mind, the problem with the “one seat before you get in the debate” logic is that, as Grey has nicely outlined, sometimes there’s little correlation between a party’s percentage of the popular vote and the number of seats they wind up with in the House. Media exposure, in particular TV, is essential to getting a new party started; it’s likely Joe Canadian wouldn’t recognize Jim Harris if he ran him over with his SUV. How many mainstream Canadians are going to vote for a party when they can’t even conjure up what their leader looks like?
Considering that unlike the Marijuana or other fringe parties, the Greens have a comprehensive platform that deals with much more than solely environmental issues, and that they’re running a full slate of candidates, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to include them in the debates.