After too many smoky hours, Bill Fox, the Tory debate negotiation leader, and I looked at each other. It was a shared, painful moment of epiphany.

Fox leaned over and said quietly, “We’re being played…!”

In the corridor a few minutes later, we both rued how long it had taken for the penny to drop. We were at the fourth or fifth round of the 1980 debate negotiations with the Great Rainmaker, Keith Davey. He let slip a small sardonic smile as he rushed past. The Tory and New Democrat debate teams, asked ourselves ruefully, “How could we have been so dumb!”

Davey had expertly drawn out the negotiations, fretting over staging colours, light levels, podium heights and other trivia, all the while declaiming, “Of course we want to debate!”

When we hapless victims complained loudly about the Liberals’ debate skulduggery, the reaction from the chattering classes was suitably outraged at Trudeau’s “attack on democracy” but from most other Canadians it ranged from, “More fool you!” to “So what?!”

It was the fateful winter election where Pierre Trudeau crushed the Tories and returned to power only months after his spring defeat. Davey knew Trudeau was not a huge asset to the ticket. He also knew that the newish Tory leader, was underwhelming. He decided, with Trudeau’s help, to design what became known at the “low-bridge” campaign — keeping Trudeau’s profile low, while pumping up some quite extraordinary policies. Remember the National Energy Program?

With it came a “campaign bubble,” where for the first time in a Canadian election, media access to the prime minister was seriously and aggressively restricted. Later, Davey described it thusly, “Our strategy involved low-bridging Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Now that was tough … because of his celebrity status in the country."

How history repeats.

The Liberals’ possible attempt to repeat the tactic by refusing all but one debate in each language, appears likely to come with presenting Trudeau only to the faithful, and limiting media access. It’s not clear that it will be well received this time.

We are now in an era where young potentially Liberal voters have little patience with clever political games and where jaded older supporters are already grumpy about what was promised versus what was delivered four years ago. Canadians’ mood, pollsters say, is increasing anxiety about the future.

It is a different time at the riding level, too. No more large sweaty political events attracting hundreds of the committed and the curious. No more access to leaders wandering the country in a fleet of campaign buses shaking hundreds of hands at day. This will be a campaign fought on social media, retweeting carefully staged, short and small encounters. It’s sadly also one where security concerns will provide an excuse for cocooning the leaders.

One of the few remaining opportunities for voters to assess a candidate’s character, authenticity, ideas and ability to perform as a future prime minister are TV debates. Trudeau is taking a large gamble in placing all his bets on one night, three weeks before election day. His campaigned will be hazed from now until then as either cynics or cowards, in thousands of tweets a day.

The contrast with our sister democracies could not be more stark. In the U.K., TV debates have grown and grown as key election pivot moments. In the U.S., literally dozens of debates over two years draw tens of millions of viewers, every time …!

Canadian voters watch debates in far lower numbers, leaving them open to manipulation of the actual performances by the campaigns’ spin doctors, unleashing floods of sneakily edited clips, before the candidates have left the stage.

It will be interesting to see if an innovative, if somewhat underhanded approach to campaign management, developed nearly 40 years ago, can be successfully repeated today. My bet is that Trudeau fils will not be able to resist the temptation to come out swinging at his opponents midcampaign, especially if the numbers remain tight.

Encountering the man who virtually invented modern campaign strategy and tools years after the 1980 campaign, I congratulated then Sen. Davey on his years of political prestidigitation, especially his clever execution of his “no debate” strategy.

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He chuckled graciously and said, “I was floored by how long it took you guys to suss it….”

Indeed.

RS Robin V. Sears is a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and was an NDP strategist for 20 years. He is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robinvsears

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