For a less awful election

The best experts believe this government is set to last for at least two years. Which means we have two years to make sure the next election is not quite as awful as this one. Some areas for improvement:

The debates. Once a novelty, these have become as much a part of the electoral landscape as lawn signs, as critical as television ads: Paul Martin’s slide in the polls began with the first debate. Yet we persist in treating them as ad hoc events, with rules left to last-minute negotiations between the major parties and the networks -- vested interests, all.

It’s time to set the rule for the debates in the election laws. This year’s debates offered some examples, good and bad. Good: more debates -- four, rather than two -- mean less hype, more substance. Let’s have one every week. (Of the campaign, I mean. Though come to think of it...) Bad: the practice of segregating the debates by language must end. Bilingual debates mean the whole country watches at the same time. Which means the leaders have to talk to the whole country, rather than one province.

Should the Greens be in? Should there be a run-off debate towards the end for the two leading candidates? Should we dispense with the quickie question-and-answer format in favour of a real debate -- 10 minute opening statement, 8 minute rebuttal, etc -- giving the leaders time, for once, to develop an argument? These are interesting questions. They should be decided well in advance of any actual election, and fixed in law.

The campaign finance laws. We’ve come a long way from the cesspool of the recent past. Bombardier is no longer making $100,000 annual contributions to the ruling party, cabinet ministers are no longer collecting secret contributions in unlimited amounts from the industries they regulate, and so on. The Harper government promises to close some of the loopholes left by the Chrétien reforms, notably in the matter of corporate contributions.

Yet, curiously, the Conservatives seem to have forgotten a key plank from their platform in the previous election: to abolish the $1.75 (now $1.83) per vote subsidy the political parties receive out of public funds. If the principle is that elections should be a matter between the parties and the voters, and therefore that parties should have to appeal to the choices of free individuals, for funds as well as votes, this seems a contradiction, to say the least.

The electoral system. Every election throws up fresh anomalies from our antiquated first-past-the-post system. Some examples this time out: The NDP, with 2.6 million votes, gets 29 seats. The Bloc Quebecois, with 1.6 million, gets 51 seats. The Greens, with more than 650,000 votes, get zero seats. Liberals in the West, Tories in the cities, federalists in Quebec, all are greatly under-represented, distorting our perception of the country and needlessly aggravating regional tensions.

That isn’t by any means the only distortion in our system. There are also vast disparities in the numbers of voters per riding. It took as many votes to elect one Tory MP in some Alberta ridings as it took to elect five Liberal MPs in PEI and Labrador. A system in which one person’s vote is worth three times, or four times, or five times another’s, depending on which party they vote for or which riding they live in, is only approximately democratic -- and not at all fair.

The tone. Politics is never a lovely business, but this election was just plain ugly. The fault lies mostly with the Liberals, but all the parties got into the mud at one point or another.

And when they were not attacking each other, they were ganging up on a perfectly decent group of Canadians: social conservatives. Again, the Liberals led the charge, but the Tories seemed as content to deflect the demonization campaign onto someone other than themselves. To listen to the rhetoric, you would never believe that anyone who had any questions about abortion or gay marriage should be allowed out in public, let alone permitted to vote.

It doesn’t have to be this way. People can change, and so can politics. The Liberal leadership race is a good place to start. Will the party elect another leader schooled in the politics of fear and smear? Or will it absorb one of the lessons of its defeat, and choose a leader with a sense of dignity and principle?

Frank McKenna and John Manley are both good men, and the race is poorer without them. But so are Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff, Stephane Dion, Ken Dryden, Gerard Kennedy... An election pitting any one of them against Stephen Harper would be a tonic.

Here’s hoping.