The Leaders’ Debates Commission has now raised the bar for who can participate in the next federal leadership debate, which will likely only affect one candidate.
People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier has criticized the commission, which Trudeau established before the 2019 election, for seemingly moving the goalposts to exclude him.
In the 2021 election, a party needed to have at least one elected MP, received 4% of the vote in the last election, or have an average level of polling support at 4% in a sampling of polls chosen by the commission.
If those rules were maintained, Bernier would be allowed to participate as the PPC ended up getting 4.94% of the votes in that election, even though it did not win a seat.
The Leaders’ Debates Commission announced Tuesday that for a leader of a federal party to qualify for participation in a debate this time around, the party has to meet two out of three criteria set out by the commission instead of just one.
For a leader to represent their party on the national debate stage, their party has to hold at least one seat in the House of Commons when the general election is called, have at least 4% support in the national polls 28 days prior to the election, or have candidates in at least 90% of the federal ridings in the same period.
The announcement was prefaced by citing the commission’s mandate, which states that the debates should “benefit from the participation of the leaders who have the greatest likelihood of becoming Prime Minister or whose political parties have the greatest likelihood of winning seats in Parliament.”
Former Radio-Canada executive and the commission’s head secretariat, Michel Cormier, said the criteria are “simple, clear, objective and measurable.”
“They measure both electability and viability, and they serve the public interest and the voting public by ensuring the leaders invited on the debate stage represent a current picture of the country’s political forces at play at the time of the next general election,” he said in the announcement.
In a statement released to social media Wednesday, Bernier accused the commission of changing the rules to prevent his party from participating in this year’s debate despite garnering more support than the Green party in the 2021 election.
He alleged last year the debate commission used “dubious polls” to exclude the PPC from the debate as many of the polls did not list the PPC as a party to vote for and only marked the option to support his party as “other.” Bernier participated in the 2019 election debate organized by the commission.
“This change only has one obvious purpose, one that unites the whole political establishment in Ottawa: Making it easier to exclude the PPC,” he said in a media release. “These new rules only affect me, the leader of the only new party to emerge forcefully on the federal political scene in decades, and none of the other leaders expected to participate.”
“They want to deny a voice to 840,000 Canadian voters who supported the PPC in 2021.”
He said it was still possible for the PPC to qualify for the debate but again referenced being at “the mercy of dubious polls,” which he said “deliberately exclude the PPC.”
The leadership commission selected the produce to host the leadership debate last October.
The English debates will be moderated by Steve Paikin, the host of TVO’s “The Agenda with Steve Paikin,” while the French debates will be moderated by Patrice Roy, a journalist and anchor of Radio-Canada’s “Téléjournal avec Patrice Roy.”
The Leadership Debate Commission attempted to bar True North and Rebel News from covering its leadership debate in the 2019 election. The exclusion attempt was defeated in court, allowing the two independent media organizations to cover the discussion after the Federal Court deemed that the commission’s actions were irrational and lacked logic.
According to information obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, The Leader;s’ Debate Commission and the federal Department of Justice spent $131,281 taxpayer dollars on legal fees fighting against True North and Rebel News in a bid to bar them from attending.
