It is arguably the most difficult issue Canadians have had to face since Confederation. It has divided Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada since initial European contact. And it came into sharpest focus this spring when hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children were discovered around several former residential schools.
But when the issue of “Reconciliation with First Nations” was introduced last Thursday night during the Leaders’ Debate – after some introductory remarks from the five leaders, one of them, Justin Trudeau, got this curt instruction from the moderator.
“You have five seconds, Mr. Trudeau,” said Shachi Kurl, the moderator. “Five seconds, sir.”
“We have lots more to do,” Trudeau said. “And we are going to do it.”
With that, moderator Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, moved the two-hour televised debate onto the evening’s fourth of five themes – affordability. The others included leadership and accountability, climate change and COVID recovery.
I’m not a debating expert – although as a citizen of this community, I think I’ve moderated just about every election debate held in Uxbridge since 1988 – I felt unsatisfied as a viewer and offended as a journalist.
That was not a debate. Worse, it did not allow any of the leaders – Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh, Yves-Francois Blanchet, Annamie Paul, or Trudeau – the time or space required to give Canadians ample response.
The creators of the Leaders’ Debate – the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), CBC, CTV and Global TV – went to a lot of trouble to assemble the leaders of the five parties at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que. They delivered the broadcast in a dozen languages. They brought in four journalists to deliver the questions. All seemed right with the design.
Then, they gave the moderator absolute power over everything. The result included this ridiculous introduction from moderator Kurl:
“Mr. Singh, you are popular and you inspire many Canadians. Your platform is full of big promises,” she said. “But when it comes to how you’ll pay for it all, there’s not a lot of detail. Given this, how can Canadians know you’re really ready to lead?”
NDP leader Singh had 45 seconds to respond. And a couple of seconds beyond his time, Kurl stopped him in mid-sentence. She treated every leader equally ridiculously, stopping him or her at the three-quarters of a minute mark and making sure there was little or no debate, complaining repeatedly, “We’re beyond our time.”
The Leaders’ Debate organizers were after the quick hit, not the heart of the issues. If I may, the discussion that this newspaper sponsored and invited me to moderate, last Wednesday night at the arena, came a good deal closer to delivering the heart.
For example, on the issue of medically assisted death, we received a cogent question on the issue from a Cosmos reader. I read it aloud. I gave each of the four candidates – Jacob Mantle, Jennifer O’Connell, Eileen Higdon, and Corneliu Chisu – about two minutes each to offer a personal philosophy as well as his/her party’s position.
As moderator, I then tried to bring the issue of conscience rights of medical practitioners in medically assisted death to our own experience in Uxbridge. That allowed each candidate to speak tangibly about the realities of our own community. There was no time limit, no interruption to move on to another topic.
I think what’s fallen through the cracks this election is context. Every moment of the campaign, we in the media (and the political parties themselves) have set up the candidates to score or fall prey to “Gotcha moments,” those interviewing or debating formats designed to entrap candidates into making mistakes.
We haven’t seen or heard enough experiential analysis of the issues, such as you find in a current affairs program and radio or TV. Former CBC Journal producer Don Young put it this way:
“Imagine you were assigned to cover D-Day,” he wrote recently on Facebook. “A news reporter would be in an aircraft above the armada of ships describing as accurately as he/she could what they saw.
“A current-affairs piece, however, would place the reporter and crew in the belly of the landing craft approaching the beach; bouncing from wave to wave, planes low overhead, bullets zinging off the armoured plating. It would be as if the viewer was embedded with the invasion troops.
“There’s a voracious hunger today for storytelling with substance, and that’s what current affairs provides,” he said.
I agree wholeheartedly. We need the stories behind the issues, the stories of Indigenous people’s needs, not just facts and figures. We need a better sense of their path to reconciliation, not ours, so that constituents understand the needs and rights of First Nations and therefore make better choices on such a vital issue come election day.