If four leaders debate in a forest ...

With any luck, this year’s instalment of Canada’s longest-running farce, the televised election debates, may turn out to be very nearly watchable. It has apparently dawned on the powers that decide these things -- that would be the networks -- that previous episodes were a national embarrassment, a disgrace to democracy, and just possibly a downer in the ratings.

Cast your mind back, if you dare: four, sometimes five over-coiffed, over-coached, and over-caffeinated candidates shouting over each other for minutes on end, interrupted only by pointless questions and irrelevant asides from the handpicked blowhards on the journalists’ panel. More people changed the channel than voted, I’ll wager.

The candidates they can’t do much about. But they have changed the rules, and by some miraculous alignment of the planets, they even seem to have changed them for the better. There will be four debates, for starters, rather than the two -- one in each official language -- that have been the norm until now. Knowing they have a chance to recover from a poor performance or ill-judged phrase in a subsequent debate, perhaps the candidates will be a little less wired this time out, even allowing for the media’s tiresome insistence on scoring these like prizefights.

(Other than the Mulroney-Turner match in 1984, has anyone ever seen a “knockout blow” landed in one of these things? No, I said other than Mulroney-Turner. Then why do the press glumly report after each and every debate on their absence?)

Even better, the organizers have arranged to shut off the other candidates’ microphones while any one of them is speaking, which will go a long way to reducing the amount of interruptions and heckling. Whether it will also prevent Paul Martin from waving a hand in his opponents’s faces to shut them up, as in the last election, is unclear.

Perhaps best of all, the questions this time will be put by regular folks, rather than by journalists. Wherever this has been tried -- as in the townhalls the CBC put together last time -- the results have been strikingly superior. Journalists ask questions that will impress their colleagues; voters ask the questions that are on their minds.

That said, there are still ways to improve the format. I’m guessing that when the lights come up for tomorrow night’s French debate (the English debate is the following night), we are still going to see the four leaders standing stiffly at lecterns. What’s wrong with that? People respond to their environments. Partly because they are standing, partly because they are separated by several feet of space, partly because we associate lecterns with set-piece speeches, the tendency is for all the candidates to bellow -- at the cameras, at each other, at the moon -- rather than to speak in something resembling normal conversational tones. Sit them down around a desk, as in the American vice-presidential debates, with a trusted moderator to keep order, and we might actually find them talking to each other, or -- who knows? -- maybe even listening.

(The same lessons might be applied in Parliament. Part of the reason debates are so much more civilized in the British Commons than in ours is simply that the two sides of their House are so much closer to each other -- you don’t need to yell. Well, that, and the educational systems.)

While four debates are better than two, moreover, it is still half as many as there might be. I don’t mean that we should have eight debates (though I’ve no objection). But is it so unreasonable to suggest that we hold all four debates in both official languages, rather than walling them off into separate, unilingual events? The effect is to persuade even that section of the viewing audience that might be inclined to watch the debates to give half of them a miss.

Worse, the French debate inevitably becomes almost exclusively a Quebec affair. It is a remarkable spectacle to see the prospective leaders of a great and powerful nation arguing, as they have on past occasions, over who did or did not subsidize the Champlain Bridge. And, needless to say, it rather over-represents one province’s interests in the national debate.

We’re used to simultaneous translation in this country. There’s no reason each debate could not be split into, say, half-hour segments in each language. That way not only would the candidates have to engage each other, but so would all parts of the country.

A final suggestion, which I pass along from a friend: With four party leaders, only two of whom have any chance of becoming prime minister, the debates tend to be scattershot affairs at the best of times. What about a knock-out format, depending on the standings in the latest polls: all four leaders for the first debate, then three, then finally the two that anyone really cares to hear from?