Building on what professor Nyblade posted about campaigning in Canada, I found this article wrote by Elizabeth May herself in the Globe and Mail.
She gives a few reason that I find interesting:
“How can a group of five television executives decide to exclude a party running in 308 ridings when they include a party that can never form government as it runs in only one province? How can debates, a critical part of the democratic process, operate in such a high-handed and arbitrary fashion? How can a party with the support of one in 10 Canadians be excluded? And most fundamentally, how can TV executives tell Canadians that a vote for Green candidates is not a real choice?”
If we take Robert Dahl’s procedural minimum definition of democracy, which involves 8 institutional guarantees, excluding the leader of the Green Party from the television debates goes against at least three of them:
- freedom of expression
- the right of political leaders to compete for support and votes
- alternative sources of information
In fact, by excluding her arbitrarily from the debates, they do not respect her right to express her opinion equally to the other national parties. Indirectly, it does not allow her to compete for support and votes because she will be disadvantaged in comparison to the other candidates, incapable of getting the same support and therefore probably reducing her chances to win new electors.
The television is one of the most important medium through which candidates can convince the people and have a political debate with other politicians in a way that is accessible for a majority of the population.
Finally, as this decision as been made for all televisions debates it provides no alternatives sources of information to expose Elisabeth May’s ideas to the public. It shows that the media is not neutral and objective but biased by a conservative view of politics. In fact, if only the parties that are actually represented in the House of Commons can publicly compete on televisions it favors the status quo and prevent minor political formations to express their ideas.
By preventing her to speak, they actually fail to represent the million of canadians that vote for the Green Party, which is breaking another democratic principle.