Superlative Debates

                                          http://www.calebmcmillan.com/

The Harperites claim that the standard leaders debate is stuffy and boring. Steve Sullivan suggests that there is a way to spice up the debates. Instead of Harper debating Trudeau, Mulcair and May, Sullivan suggests that Harper go one on one with some other opponents:

What if outgoing Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers debated Harper on the impact of his tough-on-crime policies? Sapers could calmly explain in detail what happens when you fill Canada’s prisons to the breaking point – the overcrowding, the violence, the lack of counselling and monitoring for convicts released directly into the community without parole.

Sapers could ask Harper why he targeted a small group of people with mental health issues who have committed heinous crimes — but refuses to deal with the growing population of inmates with mental health issues in our federal prisons getting no treatment and being held in solitary confinement. The Mulroney moment of the debate might go something look like this: “Mr. Prime Minister, Ashley Smith went to a provincial institution as a teenager for throwing crabapples and she left a federal prison in a body bag. You have a choice, sir. How many more Ashleys will it take before you do choose to act?”

Or there could be a debate between the prime minister and Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault:

What about a head-to-head between Harper and the information commissioner his government stabbed in the back, Suzanne Legault? She’s all business and she’d be a fearsome opponent. I can imagine her reading out statements a younger Harper made about open government, and then detailing his own disgraceful record on government information control and message-management. Then she could go in for the kill and tackle him over the budget omnibus bill clause that would retroactively change the law on gun registry data to make destroying the data legal — even though Legault has said it was an illegal act when the RCMP did it.

She could explain to him that no judge anywhere in the nation would accept the PM’s claim that trying to go back in time to reverse the effect of a law amounts to merely closing a “loophole” — that being prime minister doesn’t give him the keys to his own personal Tardis. That would be a hoot to watch.

But most entertaining of all would be a debate between Harper and Mike Duffy:

But since we’re daydreaming … who would be the perfect Harper debate opponent, the rhetorical Rhonda Rousey who would leave the PM flat on the map and tossing in the towel? Why, Mike Duffy of course. The last time the two appeared on stage together Duffy was throwing nothing but underhand; this time it would be hardball, drilled right at Harper’s head. Televise it live and you’d have a ratings monster. (The Conservatives could run Economic Action Plan ads during the breaks, so that it wouldn’t be a dead loss for them.)

I suspect the prime minister would frantically search for the nearest closet.

An Empty Chair

                                           http://www.westernfreepress.com/

An empty chair can symbolize a lot of things. John F. Kennedy's empty rocking chair symbolized the loss a nation felt after the president's assassination. But, in Stephen Harper's case, an empty chair at the consortium's leaders debate would symbolize many things -- none of them good.

To begin with, an empty chair is a pregnant emblem for a leader whose most salient characteristic is arrogance. Michael Harris writes:

Canada’s national political conversation has been emptied out by a sitting prime minister who is contemptuous of anything he can’t control. He believes that he can pay his way to re-election through the black magic of marketing and the usual bribing of the electorate with taxpayers’ money. There is nothing left but Harper’s cynicism – and his personal conviction that Canadians don’t want to talk about government anymore.

And that arrogance has led him to conclude that he has no obligation to talk to anyone:

When you think about it, Harper has never really wanted to talk with anyone other than the country’s corporate elites, and then really only a few resource peddlers. He talks at the rest.

He doesn’t answer the Opposition in parliament. Harper has never convened a first minister’s meeting where the premiers as a group could talk with him about the state of the country. Instead he talks down to them, if he talks to them at all.

Harper didn’t want to talk with Chief Theresa Spence about tangible ways to improve the lives of First Nations people some time before there is a human colony on Mars. He doesn’t talk with organized Labour about anything. He has more interaction with cats and chinchillas than journalists.

But, more than anything else, an empty chair at the consortium debate would symbolize Harper's cowardice:

Harper might be able to spin the 2015 election process into a vast electronic cattle-drive. That, after all, is what he has done with governance in Canada. But avoiding the huge audiences of the TV debates being staged by Canada’s major broadcasters can also be viewed as chickening out on the rumble.

At least Patrick Brazeau climbed into the ring with Justin Trudeau. Perhaps Harper has figured out what Brazeau never did – that underestimating your opponent can make you look weak. At the same time, hiding away from the electorate is no place to be for a man who keeps telling everyone he’s a leader. Then again, Harper is no stranger to hiding from things.

When historians write the saga of the last ten years, Stephen Harper may go down as the prime minister who hid in the closet. That's why his chair was empty.