With less than two weeks until the federal election, The Decibel is bringing you another edition of Campaign Call, The Globe’s weekly election panel.

This week, ahead of the French and English leaders’ debates, feature writer Shannon Proudfoot and chief political writer Campbell Clark will explain why debates still matter and what each leader needs to accomplish during them.

In the second half, we’re joined by Nik Nanos, the chief data scientist of Nanos Research, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the polls – in terms of how the data is gathered and how reliable polls are.

Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at thedecibel@globeandmail.com