The exclusion of Green Party leader Elizabeth May from the two national leaders’ debates is something the major broadcasters’ consortium should be ashamed of, and something we as Canadians should be outraged about.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you like her or her party’s policies, any more than you like the policies of any of the parties you don’t support. The fact is a substantial number of Canadians support them, and in a free society that voice should not be silenced.
In our riding, Westlock-St. Paul, there are few out there who would argue the Green candidate has a hope of winning this seat come May 2. In fact, last time around Conservative candidate Brian Storseth won close to three quarters of the votes, leaving the other three parties to divy up the remaining quarter.
Anyone familiar with Alberta politics is almost certain to be able to accurately predict the outcome of the 2011 election.
But there’s not one democracy-loving voter among us who would argue that the runner-up parties shouldn’t have a right to have their voices heard and to give voters more options.
The Greens earned close to one million votes in 2008, which is up nearly 300,000 from the 2006 election. We’re not talking about a fringe group of radicals with a couple hundred supporters. This is a party that runs candidates from coast-to-coast and represents the views of nearly seven per cent of voters.
Even in Westlock-St. Paul, there were 2,500 people who voted Green. Certainly we wouldn’t argue that 2,500 of our neighbours shouldn’t have their opinions represented.
What’s most distressing about May’s exclusion from the debates, however, is that this isn’t a mechanism written into the laws governing our elections. In fact, the laws say nothing about the format or even the necessity of leaders’ debates.
This decision was made by the Kafkaesque sounding “Broadcasters’ Consortium,” a committee made up of five members: CBC, Radio-Canada, TVA, Global and CTV.
These are big media groups that are unelected and unaccountable to the voters. Allowing the media to control what the electorate hears — to the exclusion of a viewpoint that represents nearly one million Canadians — should have us up in arms.
