Glop And Pail Leaves Greens Out of Debate

The Globe and Mail, Google Canada, and Munk Debates all ought to be ashamed of their brands.

In both cases, the organizers say they chose to invite leaders whose parties have official status in the House of Commons, which requires at least 12 seats. The Green party, Bloc Quebecois and Forces et Democratie each have two seats.

So, rather than doing the common sense thing, and inviting all of the parties in the House to participate (more debate is good in a democracy), they do the convenient and wrong thing instead and exclude the Greens in a faux attempt to be “fair and balanced” since they’ve no desire to see F&D no the Bloc on TV at all. Clearly, they’ve no respect for Elizabeth May or the millions of Canadians who’ve considered voting Green.

The Globe has no intention of allowing a party outside of Ottawa/Toronto’s comfortable power structure. They’ll have a harder time grabbing sound bites to rebroadcast later if they have more participants. It’s scandalous that a major newspaper would harm their journalistic integrity so badly, that TVO trumps them when it comes to principles. Heck, CBC, CTV, and Global are more ethical than the Globe, and that’s surprising (since they at least are allowing the Greens equal air time).

Google shouldn’t be evil.

I barely know of the Munk Debates, but I know I’ll never promote or watch one of their broadcasts again if they continue down this anti-democratic path. It’s ironic they’ve “debates” in their organization’s name, since they do debates so pathetically.