A better solution to improving Canadian election debates

Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne devoted a whole article to ways in which Canada's can improve the quality of its election debate.

These days, we have an entire government department, the Leaders' Debates Comission, whose sole job it is to organize these events that only occur every few years. You'd think, then, that they could do a better job. But, instead, the quality of leaders' debates has been steadily tanking for years now, devolving into a nasty and embarrassing shout-fest as candidates constantly talk over each other, interrupt, aim for sound bites rather than policy explanations, try to score cheap points, and resort to ad hominem attacks. 

Given just a short time to make their points, and an adversarial format run by primetime network television companies which seems to positively encourage such contentious fare, it's perhaps not surprising. But as a means of persuading the general voting public of their suitability for power, and of explaining the candidates' party platforms, it is less than useless.

Of course, it's not all the fault of the Leaders' Debates Commission. Most of the blame lies with the politicians themselves. You could blame it all on Donald Trump - who can forget some of his aggressive perfomances and temper tantrums in American presidential debates - but I think it was probably going this way regardless.

So, maybe we need more, longer debates, with less need to make an immediate impact and a coup de grâce. Or maybe we need to take the debates out of the hands of the television networks and have the Leaders' Debates Commission run the whole thing themselves, as Mr. Coyne suggests.

But maybe there is a much simpler solution: treat the politicians as the children they clearly are, and just manage their microphone time. Literally cut off everyone else's mics while one person is speaking, and literally cut off their own mics when their two minutes or whatever is up. I think that would focus the mind wonderfully. And if someone tries to interrupt a competitor and disrupt the process, sanction them, reduce their own available time accordingly. Maybe it's a little sad to have to resort to this, but if the result is a more comprehensible, informative and politer debate, then let's do it anyway.