Today the consortium (monopoly) that controls the televised leaders debates for the Canadian federal election decided that they would exclude the leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May. In doing so they have discredited their own debates, and will alienate a great many of Canadians who will rightly see a political class as being terrified of environmental issues.

I am not a member of the Green Party, and I will not be voting for them this election. However I am an environmentalist, and I do think it is a crucial issue in this election. I am also smart enough to recognize that the Green Party is *not* a one issue party, and that they have just as many policy positions, and just as many candidates as any other party in the country. It is clear to me that the reason they are being excluded is not because they do not qualify, but rather because the fear, from an optics perspective, is that by including them, the environment will become a more dominant issue. With Green leader Elizabeth May in the debates at least two leaders (May and Dion) if not four (May, Dion, Layton, and Duceppe) will raise the environment as an example of the Tories being totally asleep at the wheel.

The irony is that the Internet will play a central role in the narrative and day to day operation of this election. So in some regards the TV debates are a relic from the past, carried forward to satisfy a sense of ritual and ceremony. The challenge for the Greens will be to use the Internet to impact the daily coverage of the campaigns to reflect their issues and candidates. It's not about getting into the TV debates, it's about getting on the radar of the agenda setters in the news biz. Unfortunately those agenda setters control the consortium, and the consortium has so far said no to the Greens.

The threat to the consortium was that if they did grant Elizabeth May a spot on the televised debates, three of the other parties would refuse to participate, at least that's what they said, the reality is it might have only been Steven Harper who threatened boycott. It's a good bluff, if the TV debates are obsolete, then no loss if they fall apart. Maybe May will sue and force them to admit her or go off-air. The real debate is online after all.

It really is tragic that this old world mentality remains in power and still makes the decisions as to how TV news and electoral coverage goes. If only they understood what was really going on I wonder aloud to colleagues and friends. Even the way they cover the internet and what happens online is kind of pathetic as it still carries a patronizing tone as if such activity is always elsewhere but never here. TV still thinks of the internet as somewhere far away, in another world, where the audience might be, just so long as they're not here, in the studio. What's worse the internet can only be for communication, to suggest it is used for organization elicits only blank stares.

The issue of course is learning. Old dogs hate learning new tricks, yet the secret to staying young is to continue to feed your brain and learn new things. The beauty of a day job is you just need to make it to the end of the day and the end of the week. If you can pull everyone into a room each day and look them in the eye and run the job that way then no need to really learn about that internet thing. Eventually however the force of change is such that something like an election comes and low and behold that internet thing can no longer be ignored. Now the world will be able to see how you have no fucking clue.