On Twitter, Andrew Potter asked the (presumably rhetorical) question:
Has anyone done the math on "anytime, anyplace"? How many potential debates is that? A brazillion? And Harper can't make one?
Although Andrew probably wasn't looking for a 'real' answer, I thought I'd try to give him one. Now, if we use a loose definition of time and space, the answer is 'infinite'.
I wondered, however, how many possible debates could there be if we placed reasonable limits of what constituted a time and a place. Here is what I came up with.
Presumably we would not want to hold a debate on the day of the election and there probably isn't enough time to schedule a debate today, so there are 30 possible dates for a debate (starting tomorrow and ending on the day before the election). I'll require that the debate start on the half-hour (so possible start times are 7:30, 8:00, 8:30, etc.) and that the start time for the debate is between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM in whatever time zone the debate would be held in. In any one given day there are 27 possible time slots between 8:00 AM and 9:00PM and since there are 30 days, the possible number of times is 810 (27×30).
Now we need to define what we mean by place. For this I would consider a town or city to be a unique location. I wasn't able to track down exactly how many towns there are in Canada, but on Wikipedia I found that there are roughly 3 700 municipalities in Canada. I will use this as my estimate of number of places.
With 810 possible times and 3 700 possible locations, there are almost 3 million (2 997 000) possible debates.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
When the idea of 1-on-1 debates came up yesterday I immediately thought “why not a series of 1-on-1 debates?”. Each of the 4 leaders does a 1-on-1 debate with each leader. My calculation is 6 debates in total. Really that is not very many if we want voters to be informed on who they are voting for. The TV cabal probably would not want to waste the valuable airtime for 6 debates, hoeverm the CBC receives public funding and provinces also have public broadcasters e.g. TVO in Ontario, Knowledge Network in BC, not to mention the Rogers/Shaw community channels.I find it ridiculouos that we only have 2 debates (one in each language) and they are basically free-for-alls.
With the estimate of the possible number of debates at 3 million and given the possible existence of a multi-verse, it means there could 3 million possible alternative reality debates between Ignatieff and Harper each with a potentially different outcome.
And they say Economists don’t know how to have fun!
Picking up on Joel’s idea, why not a series of 1-vs-1 issue debates? For example Ignatieff and Harper could debate their comparative childcare plans, Layton and May could debate carbon taxes, Harper and Duceppe could talk about fiscal federalism, etc.
Presumably have to factor in travel time. Or we can bring back the railway! Have them debate on the move!
According to an informal Twitter poll by Adam Radwanski, there were around 10 televised debates in the Toronto mayoral election. The candidates argument that they do not have time or do not want to adjust their schedules is BS considering the current level of technology wouldn’t even require them to be in the same location.
These debates would be better and more entertaining than the grotesque photo ops where they waste their time and ours.
They don’t need to be in the same place, though jail would be a nice common ground….
They had a subset of one-one-one debates when in 2004. The previous debate in 2000 degenerated into a free-for-all and the rules were much stricter.
Jack Layton vs. Gilles Duceppe was interesting in that they don’t disagree with each other on anything except sovereignty. It felt limp, lame and came across as a damp squib.
Very dangerous with 1 on 1 issue debates. We might actually be able to understand what each leader and/or party is representing as an actual choice. Kind of cripples their ability to cloud the issue. Although I would add the other 9%+ of the population in not to mention the better debater of the last election debate and put May with the Greens in there as well. Make them all even more uncomfortable.
If we go to the extremes… we could have 10e10e10000000 universes, so = infinite debates :-)))