But then, what else did we learn from four-and-a-half hours of all-party yelling, except that Jean Charest loves his kids and Claire Lamarche is in delicate health? The format -- five leaders, four subjects, three pundits, two languages and Ann Medina -- seemed designed for maximum confusion.

Even if it mattered who "won" the debates, it should be clear by now that, as a means of clarifying the choices before the voters, they are hopelessly inadequate -- at least under present rules. Four suggestions for better debates: Put them in law. Four decades after the Nixon-Kennedy debates, nearly twenty years after their Canadian debut, it is time we admitted that televised debates are here to stay, as much a part of the Canadian electoral landscape as lawn signs and leader's tours.

Yet every election they are left to last-minute negotiations between the parties and the networks, the terms decided more by the relative bargaining power of the participants than by the public interest. The underdogs naturally push for as much exposure as they can get, while the favourites try to so restrict both time and format as to forestall any risk of catastrophe.

Were the terms to be fixed, once and for all, in the Canada Elections Act, there would be more hope of a fair result, since no party could know where it would stand in the polls in some far-off future election.

Have more of them. With only one debate in each official language, all of the media's worst tendencies come to the fore. What should be a rare chance for the public to compare the leaders and their platforms instead lapses into a kind of winner-take-all prize fight -- hence the consuming lust for "knock- out blows" -- with the media as judges. Whatever potential for enlightenment there might have been is lost in the leaders' desperation not to blow their one shot at national attention -- not to mention the constraints of covering so many issues in so little time.

If instead there were, say, four debates, one a week for the duration of the campaign, there would be more time for a civilized exchange of views, and more room to respond to events and issues as they arise. What is more, with the opportunity to recover from a poor performance in a subsequent debate, perhaps the leaders would not be quite so wired. Sure it would be less exciting, maybe even a little boring by the fourth round. No doubt the ratings would droop. But -- I realize this may be a little controversial -- these events are not staged for the benefit of the media.

Make them bilingual. One of the worst effects of the current set-up, with one debate held entirely in English and the other entirely (sauf Preston Manning) in French is to ghettoize the two official language groups. The leaders know that hardly any English-speakers tune in the French debate, and vice versa. They thus have greater latitude to tailor their message to their audience, saying one thing in English and another, slightly different, in French. The French debate, in particular, seems to revolve almost exclusively around the concerns of Quebec: try to imagine Jean Charest standing up in the English debate and boasting of the industrial subsidies his party had poured into the province.

There is no technical necessity for this arrangement. Parliament operates well enough in both official languages at once, using simultaneous translation. If that's too ambitious, it would surely be just as easy to switch the debates back and forth between English and French every half-hour or hour, rather than on alternate nights. That way the leaders would have to speak, throughout, to a single, national audience -- the only time, in fact, in the whole campaign that this would be the case.

Shut up for a second. If there is one universal complaint about the debates, it is the tendency for everyone to speak at once: not only interrupting, but talking over each other. Perhaps the networks think this is exciting. It isn't: it's not only bad for democracy, it's bad TV.

Would it be so hard to institute some sort of system for regulating interrruptions, without completely squashing spontaneity? In British parliamentary debate, for example, a member rises from his place if he wishes to interrupt or pose a question; the member with the floor may choose to give way, or carry on, as circumstances and custom dictate. If that sounds too old-fashioned, why not rig the microphones so that only one speaker can be heard at a time? Or failing that, give the moderator a raw- hide whip.