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EDMONTON — When the five main party leaders take to the stage for one of the major televised leaders’ debates during the election, they’ll stand before five moderators, all of them women, a decision that is being hailed as progress.

All five — CBC’s Rosemary Barton, the Huffington Post’s Althia Raj, Global News’s Dawna Friesen, CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme and the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt — are tremendously experienced journalists, having reported, collectively, from all over Canada and around the world.

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But that doesn’t mean the decisions made in the construction of the panel have been without controversy.

Ray Heard, who, when he was vice president of Global Television Network, co-produced the infamous Turner-Mulroney debates in 1984, raised concerns that Canada’s two national newspapers — the Globe and Mail and the National Post — aren’t involved. And, he, hardly alone among conservative commentators, said he sees a pro-Liberal bias among the questioners.