Remember the great TV debate of the 2014 Ontario campaign?

It wasn’t that memorable. Or that great.

Never mind the conflicting verdicts about who won or lost. All of us — viewers and voters — were losers in last month’s election debate.

Here’s why. The televised encounter was rigged from start to finish.

Just ask the debate moderator.

Steve Paikin has hosted a half-dozen election debates over the years, both federal and provincial. He describes the latest Ontario encounter as his worst yet.

The voluble host of TVO’s The Agenda was reduced to the role of timekeeper. Paikin found himself muzzled by the shadowy network executives and campaign managers who dictate the terms of debates from behind the scenes.

A month after Ontario’s vote, the dust has settled. But unsettling questions remain about future televised encounters.

Canadian debates have always been opaque affairs, thrown together at the last minute by an ad hoc “consortium” of television networks that negotiates behind closed doors with the rival parties. The format, length, and rules of engagement are then presented as a fait accompli without any public scrutiny or accountability.

In past encounters, Paikin has been free to pin down the leaders when they were evasive, or interject in traditional journalistic fashion. This time, for the first time, the moderator was expressly forbidden from posing follow-up questions to the three party leaders as they huffed and puffed and avoided direct answers.

“They negotiated away any ability that I had to do follow-up questions,” Paikin told me. “I will confess I did find that frustrating.”

Paikin was also frozen out of the process of narrowing down and selecting the final six questions posed to the politicians from among thousands of public suggestions.

Freed from the moderator’s control, the politicians regurgitated their rehearsed attack lines and spouted pre-digested sound bites.

That wasn’t the only problem. The not-ready-for-prime-time Ontario debate was shunted into the 6:30 time slot by the major TV networks that were determined to preserve their most lucrative advertising period after 8 p.m.

Typically, debates last two hours. This one — and there was only one — was shoehorned into 90 minutes, with an additional two minutes lopped off at the end to provide extra commercial slots for private broadcasters.

Where were the rules to safeguard voters’ interests? Quite simply, there are no rules, nor rule-makers, in Canadian debates.

And Ontario — home to the country’s biggest population, a massive media market and the second largest government — remains the wild west of debate free-for-alls, its voters treated like second class citizens.

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Quebecers, by contrast, watched two separate prime-time debates in their spring election, hosted by journalists who held the politicians to account. Federally, there has traditionally been one debate in each official language, with the moderator (most recently Paikin) free to interject.

Why not more debates? In mid-campaign, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath made the quite reasonable suggestion of five debates against her Tory and Liberal rivals, but it came too late to be taken seriously.

With a federal election looming next year, now is the time to debate the question of debates — not in mid-campaign.

The U.S. has an independent Commission on Presidential Debates that organizes three or four encounters each election season. The Americans also mix up the formats, trying out town halls that bring the politicians in closer proximity to each other and actual voters, where they tend to behave more constructively. Canadian debates remain frozen in time, stuck in stale TV studios with formal lecterns where the candidates bellow at one another from a distance.

It’s time for Canada to catch up — by banning the all-powerful network consortium. At a 2009 Queen’s University symposium on election debates, I called on our universities and think tanks to wrest them away from faceless TV executives.

Why not create a new structure akin to the U.S. presidential commission that puts more thought, predictability, frequency and fairness into our political debates — at both the federal and provincial levels? Call it the Televised Debates Trust.

If you host it, the cameras will come.

As campaigns increasingly resort to predictable photo-ops in front of shrinking crowds, televised debates remain the best opportunity for us to view the leaders and assess their policies in unfiltered, uncontrolled environments. All the more reason to convene more than one or two leaders’ debates, with additional encounters among party representatives on the key issues.

Happily, an informal group of concerned citizens has been meeting quietly over the past year to bring together a network of universities to host debates. Dubbed the U-15, it remains embryonic, but it can’t come soon enough.

Televised debates are supposed to shine a light on the political process, but they remain shrouded in opacity. It’s time we the people — viewers and voters — reclaimed the format from self-interested TV station managers and campaign managers who treat the business of democracy like show business.