Why Watson won't debate Haydon
http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/greaterottawa/archive/...

By David Reevely
http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/members/David-Reevely/defaul...

Sun, Oct 17 2010

Clearly Jim Watson's disinclination to have a one-on-one debate with Andy Haydon on transit isn't doing his campaign any real harm, but I can see how it could make a less-informed observer wonder whether Watson thinks he's up
to having that fight . In the beginning of the campaign, Watson's support for the current LRT plan was lukewarm at best. Maybe he doesn't really want to stand up and defend it?

Well, maybe, though Watson's made the decision to support the plan and could likely defend it as well as or better than Larry O'Brien, if he wanted to. The thing is, you can't debate a guy who won't be bound by facts. Haydon,
as I've demonstrated repeatedly ,
doesn't tell the truth about bus or rail rapid transit. He misquotes, distorts, cherry-picks, invents out of whole cloth. He appeals to authorities that don't say what he says they say. And he does it with such confidence --- in four-candidate debates and by himself in front of our editorial board just the other day --- that I wonder if he doesn't even know that what he's saying isn't true. It wouldn't be a debate, it'd be an ongoing live fact-check, where Haydon would say any damn thing and then Watson would have to hope like crazy that he had the real facts in his notes or his head to counter him.

If he did, it'd /still/ be a he-said-he-said situation, with Haydon saying the ridership of the Red Line downtown-circulator bus in Indianapolis is /this/ but Watson saying actually it's /that/, and no way to determine the
truth on the spot. Having done it, I know it can take half an hour or more just to run down the truth about just one false Haydon claim. At best, even with everything at his fingertips, Watson would look like a nitpicking nerd, Haydon the confident guy with the big vision.

And anyway, the guy with nearly 50-per-cent support has nothing to gain by giving a lot of one-on-one attention to the guy who's around 10 per cent. There's no trick of stagecraft that wouldn't present them to the audience as equals, which the guy who's way out in front doesn't want.

In short, there's absolutely nothing in it for Watson to have the discussion Haydon wants. And given the way Haydon argues, there's probably not much in it for the people of Ottawa, either.