Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to the inquiry instigated by our colleague Senator Donna Dasko, calling the attention of the Senate to the role of leaders’ debates in enhancing democracy by engaging and informing voters.

My friends, I am passionate on the subject of debates because I am a debater, and I mean that most literally. It would probably not shock most of you here to learn that I was an eager member of my high school debate club. Indeed, back in my Grade 11 glory days at Ross Sheppard Composite High School, my partner Esther Winestock and I won the Alberta provincial debate championships and thus the chance to attend the high school national debate championship in Montreal.

I have the fondest memories of that Montreal tournament, not just because I was ranked fifth in the country but because it was at this glorious festival of nerds that I was finally asked to dance my first-ever slow dance — not because I was the belle of the ball, but because an older boy, a member of the Ontario team, took pity on my wallflower status and kindly asked me to dance to “Stairway to Heaven,” the slow dance of our era. That boy’s name was David Lametti. He is now the Minister of Justice; I’m now a senator, and I suspect it’s fair to say that our high school debating experiences have stood us in good stead, even if our dancing abilities have not.

Debating sharpens the wits. It teaches you to think on your feet, to engage in the respectful clash of ideas, to listen, analyze and rebut in real time. In high school competition, you have to research and argue both sides of every issue. You thus cultivate the capacity to appreciate that no one side has a monopoly on good ideas. You develop respect, even for those with whom you may have an intellectual disagreement, because you’ve learned — indeed, you’ve trained — to view things from the opposite point of view.

Debate also did wonders for my social life, and not just in high school. I went on to be a member of the University of Alberta Debate Society, where my partner Jason Lucien and I won the McGoun Cup, the western Canadian university debate championship. Jason remains one of my dearest friends.

But it was also at the University of Alberta debate club that I met my Valentine, my husband, 40 years ago this coming fall. You might say he and I have been debating together ever since. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we raised a debater. Our daughter — poor child — could hardly escape her fate. Call it nature, call it nurture, she was genetically engineered and raised for debate competition. And oh, she was very good. She attended the junior high national debate championships twice and ended up ranked the third-best debater of her age in the country, surpassing my own standing.

When she started high school, however, she rebelled. And oh, how she rebelled. I don’t want to shock you, but I must tell you: She traded in her debate podium for the stage and became captain of her high school improv team instead. She insisted that somehow improv was more fun. Goodness knows why. Still, now that she’s an articling student defending her legal clients, she’s finding her debate chops are coming in very handy.

I wasn’t just a debater or a proud debate mom, which is like being a hockey mom with less skate lacing and more rebuttal prep. I also spent decades volunteering my time as a debate judge and coach, writing how-to guides for the Alberta Debate and Speech Association, teaching and coaching junior high, high school and university debaters on the basic skills and the finer points of cross-examination and parliamentary-style debate.

So when I tell you that our current format for federal leaders’ debates doesn’t work, I’m not just speaking as a current senator, nor as a long-time political journalist. I’m speaking as a debate aficionado. I know good debate when I see and hear it, and the way we structure our federal election events simply isn’t conducive to good debate, no matter who’s on the stage. There is no clear, clean clash of ideas. There are few opportunities for direct engagement at all. There’s an overreliance on pre-memorized talking points and canned answers, so we don’t always have much chance to see candidates thinking on their feet and grappling with opposing points of view.

Part of the problem, of course, is our increasingly multi-party system. A conventional debate works best when you have two opponents at a time, and those days are long gone. When you have four or five or six rival leaders onstage shouting each other down, squeezing each other out, it’s hard to come up with a format that allows for one-on-one argument and refutation.

But then — and I say this with all due respect to the various journalists involved — we don’t really have a debate at all. We have questions posed by journalists — sometimes good questions, and sometimes not. Then things degenerate into a sort of competitive press conference to the death, where the rival leaders fight to give the best sound-bite answer, even if that response has precious little to do with the question they were asked.

Then, as soon as the debate is over, each leader’s partisans take to social media to trumpet the victory of their candidate, and the pundits immediately begin their instant analysis. By the next morning, millions of Canadians who never watched the debate in the first place are convinced that they know who won.

Why do we attach so much importance to leaders’ debates in the first place? After all, I think we in this chamber know that oratorical skills, while very handy, aren’t actually the litmus test for a great leader or a great prime minister. You can be a fine, witty, charismatic public speaker and be a disaster at public policy creation or caucus management. Rhetorical flourish doesn’t make you a good economist nor a sound military strategist nor an expert in jurisprudence. Yet we demand that our leaders engage in these ritualistic public speaking duels. Why?

Perhaps we can blame, or credit, the Greeks and the Romans, on whom we base so much of our modern democracy. In the Athenian Agora or the Roman Senate, rhetorical skills were deemed a mark of intellect, of leadership ability, and seen as a path to political power, whether they were deployed to convince an elite audience or to inspire a mob.

Long after the Acropolis had crumbled and Rome had fallen, the myth and romance of the ancient world informed and inspired the English aristocracy, who, over centuries, modelled their parliamentary notions on classical ideals. Which is why, even today, in the multicultural, pragmatic Canada of the 21st century, we expect our leaders, our prime ministers, to follow in the models of Aristotle and Pericles, Cicero and Caesar, to show off their prowess as orators and win verbal sparring matches. We ask them simultaneously to entertain us and to prove their worth, yet it is undeniable that in our age of television, live streaming and social media, a good debate performance matters, politically speaking, when it comes to shaping public opinion.

Back in 2011, Alison Redford was vying for the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party. Redford’s mother died the night before the televised debate amongst the leadership contenders. Some expected her to pull out. Instead, she showed up at the studio and so impressed the TV audience that she ended up overtaking the three male frontrunners and becoming Alberta’s first female premier.

It must be said, a lot of Albertans waited a long time to see the same qualities that Premier Redford displayed that night play out in real life, but there is no doubt that the grit, the composure and compassion voters saw helped propel Redford to victory.

In Alberta’s 2015 election, it was Rachel Notley’s fierce and funny performance in the leaders’ debate that fuelled her landslide victory. Although you could also say that the debating failures of Conservative leader Jim Prentice and Wildrose leader Brian Jean did a lot to make Notley Alberta’s first NDP premier.

I remember my father — a blessed memory — a good Red Tory, calling me up, disgruntled, the morning after the debate. “It wasn’t fair,” he grumbled. “Why not?” I asked. “She was just so charming,” fumed my father. “She was impossible to beat.” My dad wasn’t the only one to think that. The night of that debate, Alberta’s current premier, Danielle Smith, was working as a TV pundit, providing live debate analysis. “I’m in a room full of business conservatives,” she said that night. “Feedback so far is the men look grim and Rachel looks great.”

When I think back on that historic 2015 Alberta leaders’ debate, I remember it not just for its outcome, but for its structure. The debate had four participants, but the format allowed them to face off one-on-one, which allowed for some genuine clashes of ideas and personalities. It was a debate that changed people’s minds, not just because of Jim Prentice’s infamous “math is difficult” gaffe, but because people had the chance to scrutinize Prentice, Jean and Notley side by side — to compare and contrast — and to see who seemed the smartest, the most intellectually agile and the most sincere. Despite all the superficialities and frustrations of our TV debate culture, I still believe that political debates can have a real place in showing us a candidate’s grace under pressure, their quick-wittedness and their ability to connect with people.

However, if we want these TV debates to continue, and to provide meaningful context, we need to have a long, hard discussion about their format, their structure and their ultimate purpose. We need a debate model that really allows for a clash of ideas — one that forces leaders to defend their platforms and their principles. And we need to make sure the leaders do that work, not the journalists.

We need to hear the candidates in candid, unrehearsed conversation with each other — thrusting and parrying. We also need tough, strong moderators who will keep people to time, crack down on bullying and generally enforce the rules of fair debate. We don’t want to sit through long, boring prepared sermons — nor do we want a shouting-match free-for-all. No; what we want is debate that is, at least, as good as it was at my daughter’s junior high school. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, nor too much to expect.

My thanks to my friend Senator Dasko for launching this inquiry, and for allowing me this little chance to reminisce.

Be it resolved, then, that this house believes in the power of political debate, and in the necessity of finding a way to make it work for the 21st century.

Thank you. Hiy hiy.

By all means.

That is a very good question. In my speech, I didn’t really delve into — I was having too much fun, perhaps — whether having a commission is the best strategy, as opposed to letting individual broadcasters, or journalistic organizations, organize the debates. I know that someone close to your family was involved in the recent provincial debate in Quebec as a journalist crafting very careful questions. What is that expression? “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” It may be that there are too many cooks.

The challenge is that when you have this many leaders, getting them all on stage at one time — when it is not necessarily in everyone’s strategic interest — is very difficult. The fact that we had only one English-language debate was very frustrating to me since I, apparently, have an unslakable thirst to quench. I always find that watching the French-language debate is often much more interesting.