Homework For Leadership Candidates - Fix the debates

For what its worth, I (along with much of the party - and Canadians as a whole) have been lulled to sleep by the Leadership Debates. We have a problem with the typical dancing around issues. With a 3 or 4 candidate race, this "dancing" is often interspersed with some real discussion based on candidate's actual leanings and ideologies. Not semantics and platitudes.

Thinking about this brought me to this conclusion: What does one do when you ask a bunch of school kids to speak intelligently on issues of the day? Usually you'll try to get them to put something useful on paper first. Once the "kiddies" have put their thoughts on paper, they are reviewed and graded. Finally, papers can be presented to the class.

For our next Leadership Debates I suggest we go completely "out of the box", by asking all candidates to provide summary papers on the main topics/questions. The Party would receive the papers, then phrase questions based on the candidates written positions. I think this would help focus the debates. We could provide copies of the papers - and candidate responses - to all party members (online, or paper format) to ease our information gathering.

I'm tired of waiting for some campaigns to produce "intelligent" commentary on the key topics of the day. With 11 candidates on the go, we really need to do something to help compare and contrast all of them. I'd even go as far as to put the candidates views into a spreadsheet - just to help us clear through the useless drivel. We need to get away from the "popularity contest" we're currently seeing, and get into more of a discussion of issues - before it is too late.