The People’s Party of Canada leader argues that the new standards for debate participation are intended to make it easier to exclude his party.
(LifeSiteNews) -- People’s Party of Canada (PPC) leader Maxime Bernier says new rules put in place by the Leaders' Debates Commission effectively will bar him from participating in the 2025 federal debate.
“This change only has one obvious purpose, one that unites the whole political establishment in Ottawa: making it easier to exclude the PPC,” Bernier said in a press release sent to LifeSiteNews.
Bernier says that the “new rules” only affect him, the “leader of the only new party to emerge forcefully on the federal political scene in decades, and none of the other leaders expected to participate.”
“They want to deny a voice to 840,000 Canadian voters who supported the PPC in 2021,” he noted.
In the 2021 federal election, all parties needed to meet only one of three criteria that would enable their leader to qualify to participate in debates. These were either having at least one elected MP, getting four percent of the national vote, or having at least four percent support in national polling.
The PPC had 4.9 percent overall support on election day. However, recent polls show their support at between two to three percent.
The new rules now state that parties must meet two of the three new criteria, which are at least one MP, four percent polling, or candidates run in 90 percent of ridings.
As a result, Bernier has effectively been shut out of the next leadership debate unless his party gains support in the polls and has candidates in most ridings in Canada.
The leaders’ debate commission claimed that they had consulted all parties regarding the rule changes, but the PPC disputes that contention.
According to the PPC, the commission states in its document that when “consulting the parties about the new rules last year,” it received submissions from only the Bloc Quebecois, the Conservative Party of Canada, the Green Party of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada, and the New Democratic Party of Canada.
“This is not true. A PPC staffer sent a submission to Michel Cormier, the Commission’s Executive Director, on July 3, 2024, two days before the deadline, in which it was argued that the Commission should keep the same criteria as in 2021,” the PPC said in its press release.
“Not only is the Commission trying to exclude Mr. Bernier from the debates, but it seems like it did not take the PPC submission into account. The PPC is still awaiting an explanation from the Commission as of Wednesday 1:00 pm.”
Bernier noted that while it's “still possible for the PPC to qualify,” the party is “again at the mercy of dubious polls, some of which we know deliberately exclude the PPC from the list of potential responses, which inevitably understates our level of support.”
“Instead of using the hard data that are the results of the last election, which prove without doubt that the PPC is one of the major parties whose voice is essential in Canadian policy debates, and, the Commission has chosen to rely on fleeting data that can easily be manipulated and will be obsolete a few weeks later,” he noted.
“Why does the Commission need to change its criteria every electoral cycle? Isn’t it weird that a Commission is kept alive, and public funds are spent to carry consultations with experts and parties, only to come up every few years with new rules that make the participation of the PPC more difficult? Does it exist to facilitate democratic debates or to censor a populist voice?”
Bernier was one of the only Canadian politicians who spoke out against COVID dictates of all kinds.
The PPC, while not winning any seats in the 2021 election, almost quadrupled its vote total from the 2019 election. The party won five percent of the popular vote, according to Elections Canada.
