The 2004 election may yet prove to be historic, but so far it’s been the same travesty these things usually are. The party leaders spend most of their time slandering each other and answering questions about what some local candidate said on an Internet chat room a decade ago. The media pass idle hours trawling for “gaffes” and reporting on themselves reporting on themselves. And in a couple of days, everyone—candidates, media and public—will undergo that mysterious fit of collective insanity known as the debates.

How these came to be the defining moments—to use a traditional cliche of debate coverage—of our elections is beyond me. We are electing a government, not a high-school debating champion. Don’t get me wrong: Debates can be valuable opportunities to compare and contrast the leaders and their platforms. Each of the leaders gets the chance to probe the others’ weaknesses, while the public is granted an extended period of close-up scrutiny of the candidates in a spontaneous setting.

But that is a very different thing than what the debates have become, which is simply a prize-fight. There is something ludicrous, and just a little disturbing, about deciding an election, not even on the basis of what was learned in the brief chaos of a five-week campaign, but purely on the strength of who “won” or “lost” on a single night, as determined by those peerless arbiters, the media.

Worse, the format the networks have adopted over the years seems contrived to obscure whatever faint hope there might have been of any insight emerging from these affairs. The candidates are encouraged to shout over each other, to go “toe to toe,” to “mix it up,” in hopes of that holy grail of media moments, the “knock-out blow”—or rather, in the immortal words of Rick Salutin, “useable clips.” This feeds the media’s appetite for conflict and its addiction to narrative—“in hindsight, it is clear the turning point in the election was when …” It has no other use.

Why have the debates, so full of promise, become such wastes of time? Because we have left the design of them to last minute, ad hoc negotiations between the networks and the parties: vested interests all. The party ahead in the polls wants to have none. The party behind in the polls wants to have six. They saw it off at one in each language (meaning, in practice, one for the rest of the country and one whose sole focus is Quebec.)

One! To win the Democratic nomination for President, John Kerry had to debate dozens of times; to be President, he’ll have to debate the incumbent at least three more times. Candidates in the recent election for mayor of Toronto debated something like 72 times. But to be prime minister of Canada, you just have to have one good night, maybe even one good line. (John Turner came this close to becoming prime minister on that very basis.)

So the first thing we should do to reform how the debates are conducted is to take them out of the hands of the people participating in them, and entrench them in the election laws. Forty-four years after Nixon-Kennedy, debates are no longer a novelty: they are as much a part of the electoral landscape as lawn-signs. Yet we still have no clear rules to guide us on, say, whether the Green Party should be allowed to participate. Who decides these things now? The networks—and the other parties.

By setting the rules in law, away from the pressures of any impending election, it would be possible to establish rules that were fair to all, since no one could know in advance where they would stand in the polls. If it were up to me, there would be no fewer than four debates, perhaps at the end of each week of the campaign, and each would be in both official languages—Canadians are used to simultaneous translation. The precise subject matter, as well as other details of presentation, could be left to an independent panel of some kind to determine.

As a matter of preference, I think it would be well to do away with the podiums, and sit the candidates around a table, as is the practice in some countries. Behaviour responds to environment: At the podium, with a distance between you and your rival, the temptation is to shout and pound the lectern. Sitting next to someone, the tone turns conversational, even collegial. Recall the vice-presidential debate in 2000, as an example.

Last, away with the self-important panels of journalists asking questions of the candidates. Hire a moderator acceptable to all sides, and give him or her the powers needed to keep the debate on an even keel: no shouting, no interrupting, or your microphone is cut off. And let the candidates ask the questions of each other. They’re the ones running for office, after all. If they don’t address the questions that are of interest to the voters, they’ll pay for it in the usual way.

Would this be less exciting than the present format? Yes, it probably would. Possibly the ratings would suffer as a result. But this isn’t an episode of Survivor. It’s an election, remember?