The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 36

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. This week's Munk Members only podcast, featuring Janice Gross Stein and Rudyard Griffiths, focuses on three stories in the news this week: why was last night's federal election debate in Canada such a disaster? What can we do to actually organise debates that work for voters? How are we to read the smoke signals the Taliban are sending to the international community with the announcement of a hardline governing cabinet? And, what does Angela Merkel's political exit from stage left mean for the future of Europe? We discuss it all. To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here. Your host and moderator, welcome to this, our regular monk members-only podcast. This is our weekly program where we focus on the big issues, ideas in the news, hopefully leave you with some new analysis and insights. And to do this, we're exceedingly fortunate to be joined each week by Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding

director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally acclaimed scholar and author, and she's all ours for the next 30 minutes. Janice, great to be in dialogue with you again. end today. Great to be with you, Richard, and I'm going to take over your role for a minute here. I didn't tell you that I was going to do this. Nice. And I'm going to ask you, because you have had a lot of experience organizing debates, nobody better in this country. What did you think of that debate last night? Yeah, Janice, you know, actually, I was thinking of you because some of our listeners may remember that in 2015, the Monk debates organized a federal election debate with the major party leaders on Canada's foreign policy. And you were really behind the scenes just such an

important resource to me to shape and craft those questions that we put together to structure that debate, arguably, and I'm not blowing our own horn here, Janice. People can go back and look at the media reports to produce a debate that was critically acclaimed, that was focused on the big issues that allowed the leaders to have extended exchanges between each other, that in a sense created a debate. Last night was not a debate. Last night was some weird combination of a kind of game show, TV producer mentality, merged with the worst aspects of question period, which are these ridiculous soundbite answers

and sniping and cross-talk. And, you know, in 2019, I kind of forgave the debate commission once for botching the only English language debate that we get. I'm not forgiving this time. You know, we have taken, this is so Canadian, Janice, we've taken something that really wasn't a big national problem. Of a thousand issues facing the country, the fact that prior to 2019, the TV networks were organizing and paying for the debates was probably issue a thousand. What did we do in 2019? Well, this government, this prime minister, created a commission to organize debates. That commission was given millions of dollars of public funds to stage the debates.

And it botched them. It botched them badly in 2019. It then had all this time to recover from that, to think through where its errors were and why the 2019 debate failed so catastrophically. It received millions more dollars in public subsidies, millions of more dollars which it now gives to the broadcasters to produce another debacle of a debate where the broadcasters are using these events as vanity projects to profile their on-air talent. So my final part of this rant, Janice, is at the end of the day, nobody is working in service of the voter here. nobody is giving the voter the knowledge, the information, the experience they need in a debate to make an informed decision when they vote. The TV networks are feasting on this as a source of revenue and, again, a profiling of their on-air talent, a branding exercise. The Debates Commission, I think, has completely tuned out.

David Johnson should resign this morning as the chair of that commission. And we have to figure out a different way to do this. It's too important. We're spending half a billion dollars in this federal election. The debates are a centerpiece. And we botched it twice. Too much. Three times, come on.

Let's not go there. That's insanity. I agree that. I agree. We cannot debate this this morning, Roger. It was painfully boring, first of all, which is deathly the people who really care about these issues. And I agree, and here's an interesting example where the way you structure things really matters. Format matters. Format matters. Structure matters. Those leaders, whatever you want to

say about them, are not boring. You know, Anne-Marie Paul is not boring. She's got huge organizational challenges in a party, but she's not boring. Justin Trudeau is not boring. And surprise, surprised, Erin O'Toole is not boring. He's much less boring than we thought he would be. Nobody could join any issue last night. The way the debate was structured. And people tuned out, and let me tell you, my kids' friends, so two generations down, had three choices last night, a baseball game. A Canadian in the U.S. Open. in semifinal and the debates, most of them skipped the debates entirely because I asked. And then the one who tuned into the debate lasted five minutes and moved right on, moved from

the tennis game to the debate, but only stayed in the debate for five minutes and moved right on to the final. Now, that's got to tell you something. The debates are irrelevant now in our election. We're killing them. We're killing them. Well, that's right. And if we step back for a moment, why do you and I care so much about debates? We care because that's where different ideas are joined. If you're a voter and you want to understand what makes these leaders different, where their platforms differ and you care about one or two or three of the big issues,

and that's going to inform your vote. You didn't get there last night. We have to do something about this. You and I have talked in so many different ways during the course of this podcast about democracy. And what's important for democracy? Well, debate is everything. You know, in democracy, we don't kill each other in democracies

when we disagree, like other countries. We don't arrest each other and put each other in jail. We debate, but we can't continue with a diminished quality of what we saw last night so that we are turning off our own citizens. So I probably feel even more strongly than you do, Roger. Yeah, and it's just the insult to injury was that we took something that, again, wasn't really a problem. It wasn't terrific that the broadcasters who were heavily regulated were organizing the debates. But, you know, we had decades of reasonably good, not stellar, but reasonably good election debates. We then create a government commission. We give it

millions of dollars of taxpayers subsidy to pay the broadcasters many fold more than they were spending on their own previously to then come up with such a such a kind of substandard effort and result out of all that effort and expense it it worries me janice just it goes to this thing about competency and look i don't want to get i don't want to kind of get existential here but you just You worry a bit. You just put the debacle on Afghanistan to, you know, our failure with long-term care facilities in COVID, to our inability to implement a federal payroll system, to procure ships and vessels and helicopters and planes to simply the government's ability to organize a debate. We can't even do that. We can't even tie our shoes. So I just feel, Janice, all of us who care about this,

you know, let's let the dust settle on this election, but we've got to come together and find some kind of civil society solution to this. I don't think it's the monk debates. I don't, you know, I'm not putting my hand up for the Monk Foundation to do this. You know, I've written some articles over the years. You have also in others, you know, I think the U-15, the 15 biggest universities in Canada could be a really interesting place to kind of create a home for an election. debate initiative. They're large. They represent hundreds of thousands of students, faculty, the communities they live in. They are bona fide places of public debate and discussion, Janice. You've done amazing things at UFT to ensure that. Let's give this over to the U15,

our biggest universities, and let's create something that's of a scale where the leaders simply can't say no, because that's the problem, is that the leaders shop around. They do the TV ad debate in 2019. They don't do the Monk debate on Canadian foreign policy. Justin Trudeau passed on that, so that debate fell apart. So we need to create something that's at a scale that has something behind it that's big enough that it intimidates even the sitting prime minister to show up and to be subject to some kind of rigorous debate methodology.

We clearly have to, there's no question about it. We have to change the structure. I think people would be hard. this morning, those of us who sat through that boring performance. I was hard pressed to say, one of the two big election issues. You know, did I walk away from that debate understanding where the parties really differed on an issue that I cared about?

And I think that's what we're all looking for. I know people who watch, who participated in this debate through Twitter. Twitter. So think about what that says. They were so turned off by what they were watching that they went to the high megaphone place where people normally just scream at each other and insults each other and join the debate secondhand with people whose interests are to make this as shrill as possible. When you hear that, you say something is fundamentally wrong with our political institutions. So I agree with you, coming out of this election, as soon as it's over, because who knows

how long we have until the next election, frankly, we have to bring together a coalition of groups who say, this is not good enough. This is simply not good enough for a functioning democracy. Whatever else you want to say about the United States, they have debate among their political leaders. And mostly they work. Mostly, yeah. And they have, you know, dozens of debates in their primaries and caucuses. They have debates, multiple presidential debates. You know, we have one English language debate. That's part of the problem, Janice. We put all of our eggs in this single basket. In 2015, when we had the Monk debate on foreign policy, that was an amazing year. There was a McLean's debate. There was a Globe and Mail debate on the

economy. There were multiple French language debates. It's, you know, again, the election doesn't need to be taken over by debates, but at the same time, to have, to think that government should intervene into the writ period to assert itself and to formalize the structures of democratic conversation within an election is in itself, to me, a kind of scary thing. It's, government should get the heck out of elections. They should not be intervening with a sitting prime minister appointing the members of the debate committee. Okay? You know, this is your conflicts of interest here that are just immense. Let's soften that last bit just a little bit because, just a little bit, because David Johnson and others like him have a record of public service and impartiality and arms length.

So I don't think the problem is so much with the commission, by the way. I think the problem is with the broadcasters and the format. And it almost seemed to me at times there were more moderators on that stage, Roger, than there were political leaders. The problem is with the commission because they're not asserting themselves in saying this is the structure of the debate. Yeah. They are simply RFPing this in a very government kind of way of thinking and functioning

and saying, you show us a proposal? And what's this weird idea that only television broadcasters and on-air television personalities, you know, can be moderators or can do these things? I mean, we organized in a successful debate. We're not a broadcast entity. There's a weird conceit there. You know, when I used to work in television, the producers had a nickname for us behind our backs, the people that were on-air, the anchors.

They called us meat puppets, Jan. meat puppets. Okay, so let's be honest about the quality of the moderation last night, which was frankly appalling, the quality of the questioning, which was at best chaotic, substandard. I mean, this is a round-the-horn failure here on multiple aspects. And what I worry about in Canada is, you know, at the end of the day, very few people, if any, are ever held accountable. It'll be really interesting to see if David Johnson has the gumption. the sense of his own reputation and standing in Canada to do the right thing and to resign this morning.

You can't screw this up twice. It's just an epic fail. It is an epic fail. There's no doubt about it. And the one comforting thing we can take away from all of this, Richard, is once a failure, Canadians write that off and justify it. So, oh, we'll learn from our mistakes. We'll do it better next time.

Two failures in a row like this, where no issues are joined, you know, going back to the debate that we had in 2015, there was a moment in that debate and the election turned on that sharp exchange between then Prime Minister Stephen Harper and, you know, aspiring Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And the people were tuned in and the election turned on that. there was not a single moment that even approached that in the debate last night. So I think coming out of this election, it's impossible to justify the existing structure. Something has to change. We just have to be loud enough, Roger. Yeah, let's do it. After this is all over.

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