Reclaim the debates for Canada: No Green? No Moderator!
Submitted by Jason Hammond on 8 September 2008 - 5:52pm.
Steve Paikin (from TVO, not a consortium station) has been chosen as the English language debate moderator. See the press release here. You can reach Steve Paikin by email at spaikin@tvo.org to encourage him to publicly refuse to moderate an undemocratic debate that does not include the Greens. TVO is a public network that delivers highly intelligent programming, including Mr. Paikin's show ("The Agenda"), and neither he nor the network should contribute to such a travesty of electoral justice.
Jason Hammond
Male Co-Chair, Young Greens of Canada
youth.greenparty.ca
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I'll be doing this later
I'll be doing this later after I cool down a little. I'm going to put together a list of where people can write and protest. I think we should also put pressure on Dion to not show up if May doesn't get to. It will have a lot of Canadians wondering what's going on if the Liberals aren't in the debate. They'll see it as a sham, and both the Liberals and Greens will benefit from the publicity of Dion standing up for democracy.
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My blog is www.abandonedstuff.com
Emailed Steve Paikin
I have emailed Steve.
We elected Elizabeth to raise issues that weren't being addressed in Canada.
Layton and Harper didn't talk about climate change in the 06 debate, and now they won't let May speak.
Keep this issue on top.
And we can keep raising the policies and ideas that we need to raise.
Darcy Higgins
I emailed Steve Paikin too...
I agree we need to keep this issue on top. It might actually keep the major media outlets more interested in giving coverage to the Green Party than our policies (sad, but true).
Hopefully if enough people contact the decision makers Elizabeth will get her chance in the TV debate. However, if the decision is not changed would it be possible for Elizabeth to have a "virtual debate"?
This is what I was thinking. The policy messages being presented by the other parties could be stated by stand-ins (surely someone would volunteer to act like Harper, Layton, et al.) Elizabeth could then state the Green Party policy in return. The questions could be done in video snippets that could then be made available online for all to see. I realize this pales in comparison to being in the TV debate but it could create some interest (and humour) from voters.
Kevin Shaw
Petrolia, Ontario
debate
I think we're all so upset and shocked right now that it's hard to know where to start. Unfortunately, this issue could end up sucking a lot of energy and time from campaigning. Alternatively, if we can harness support from this issue it could turn out to be positive. The average voter is going to here about this and then over the 5 weeks of the campaign forget about it unless we keep it out there in the news. We need to get all Canadians (not just Greens) enraged about this attack on democracy. I think that emailing Steve Paikin is a great idea but if he turns it down they will just select someone else. Are there any international election observation groups that we can appeal to? It's kind of ironic that we send observers to other countries to ensure that they run fair elections yet we can't even run our own elections fairly.