As soon as this prolonged election campaign at last reaches its conclusion — on Oct. 19 — everything that happened during it will vanish almost instantly from our memories.

This is because it is only the election’s result that matters. This of course will be whether the nation will have determined that Stephen Harper should continue on as prime minister or that he should be replaced by either Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau or by New Democrat Thomas Mulcair.

(As a complication, should it turn out none of these three have won a majority, this result may well take up quite a bit of time to get resolved.)

As is almost always the case, the campaign itself won’t be worth remembering. Almost all of them now amount to an auction staged without any rules and consisting almost entirely of exaggerated rhetoric full of sound and fury signifying little and of promises — of bribes, that is — made to entice this or that group of voters rather than to improve the nation’s state.

Just occasionally, though, something gets said or done that is worth keeping in the memory for its own sake.

One such happened, if by accident, in the 1993 election. The Progressive Conservative leader of the day, Kim Campbell, brand-new as prime minister, uttered the astounding declaration that elections were “not a time to discuss important issues” (those were not her actual words but were the essence of a long, rambling, commentary that she made).

The media, and the opposition, jumped upon her words as an insult to all Canadians. Campbell, and the Progressive Conservatives, were cut down to just two seats.

Time passed and tempers cooled. It’s its now widely accepted that Campbell was right.

Another example has just happened in the current election campaign. Unlike Campbell’s effort it was wholly intentional.

On Friday last a TV debate in French involving the three national contenders and also Gilles Duceppe, leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois, was held in Montreal. One issue debated at length was that of the wearing of niqabs by Muslim women. Duceppe and Harper favoured limiting the rights of these women. Mulcair and Trudeau argued that such a limitation would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Almost certainly the Mulcair-Trudeau argument will win out legally eventually. Election debates, though, are not about what is right but what wins votes. Especially in Quebec, but also across the country, polls show considerable support for limiting, even banning, the wearing of niqabs.

Trudeau’s views matter. But Mulcair’s matter more. In the last election, the NDP won an extraordinary 59 seats out of the 75 in Quebec. That achievement is why the party is today a serious national contender, for the first time in its history.

Yet Mulcair didn’t blink. He not only said what he believed during the debate but afterwards sought out reporters to repeat his convictions.

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That’s honesty of a degree rare among politicians at the best of times. For one to do it in the middle of an election is just about unheard of. When the vote counts come in on Oct. 19, Mulcair and his party may well regret their outburst of honesty.

But, at least in this instance, Mulcair will have shown Canadians that there can be more to elections than exaggerated rhetoric and carefully calculated promises of which many are indistinguishable from outright bribes.

Richard Gwyn’s column usually appears every other Tuesday. gwynr@sympatico.ca

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