It was supposed to have been the grand climax of the six-month leadership process, the epic final presentations designed to wow the Liberal faithful who were registered to vote, and that last chance to gain the necessary second- and third-place support for the ranked ballot process. Instead, it was largely a parade of disappointment, campaigns out of steam and in some cases, visibly out of cash, and a confirmation that the race belonged to Trudeau without any shred of doubt.

After the tributes to Bob Rae, who apparently has been elevated to full leader status in hindsight, if you listened to what the presenters said, the presentations began, each candidate given a full twenty-five minutes to showcase themselves and their campaigns. That’s right – twenty-five minutes, which it quickly became apparent was an interminable length of time for most candidates.

Deborah Coyne was first up, and after a brief video presentation to the tune of Ben Harper’s “I Believe in a Better Way,” and the introduction of one of her young campaign volunteers, Coyne took the stage, and delivered a fierce and pointed speech, and blew the room away, setting a high bar for the rhetorical standard that was needed to beat her solid performance. Just kidding! It was kinda dull. Okay, more than that, it was slowly but surely sapping the will to live of most of the people watching it. I mean props to Coyne for her ideas and her desire to get them into the race, but what this ended up being was an expensive head start to a nomination race for a yet undecided Toronto-area riding for the next election.

Karen McCrimmon was up next, the lowest-rent presentation of them all – no video, but a lone bagpiper, piping her up to the stage, where she ditched the lectern, and simply had a Madonna-mic attached to her ear, where she addressed the crowd. McCrimmon spoke frankly in that she knew she was an outlier, but she did it all because she listened to her heart, which is what the party needed to do – follow its heart. And thus set up a series of flashbacks of being in the car with my mother while she listened to CDs of motivational speakers, which is pretty much what McCrimmon delivered, to the point where I was quite convinced that her campaign volunteers would be selling CDs and DVDs of her other motivational speeches at the back of the room. Well, that or this scene from Bridget Jones’ Diary, and when McCrimmon made references to “slicing and dicing,” well, it pretty much sold that point.

Joyce Murray had the first professional video presentation of the evening, well shot and edited, with some high-profile personalities talking about her credentials, and this NFB-documentary style look at her life, and this was followed up by a live band that featured a drum and two xylophones, before Murray herself took the stage. But instead of delivering a message with any sense of passion or conviction, the delivery was weak, and the content was not much better. While trying to sell her vision of electoral cooperation to defeat Stephen Harper, Murray’s cognitive dissonance started to burn – “cooperation” to run a single progressive candidate, but we don’t want an American two-party system! Huh? Exactly. She had a narrow vision of why the Liberals lost the previous couple of elections that was predicated on vote-splitting rather than the lack of a coherent message, or being punished for arrogance while in power and the scandals that followed. And with a quote from her hero, Nelson Mandela, she was off.

And then came the juggernaut. Trudeau had a fairly slick video presentation with a higher-energy soundtrack, and while Murray had a thin crowd surrounding the stage, Trudeau had hundreds of supporters crowding around, and there was a palpable sense of energy. He addressed the crowd “as a son of Quebec, a grandson of British Columbia, and a servant of Canada.” His speech, delivered with the aid of a teleprompter – the first time in the campaign, we are told – said little new, but was delivered with the polish and professionalism that all other speeches to this point and those that followed all lacked. It had the energy and sense of fire and conviction that Murray lacked, and while his requisite shots at Harper and Mulcair, he also ended with what could be his coming slogan – “Hope and hard work,” the elements of what the party needs to move forward.

Martha Hall Findlay’s video and march through the crowd was to the tune of Heather Small’s “Proud,” which it was pointed out over the Twitter Machine is also the theme song for The Biggest Loser, which may have been subconsciously apropos. “My name is Martha Hall Findlay, and I’ll be your underdog this afternoon,” she began with disarming frankness, but then proceeded to deliver what sounded and felt like a concession and farewell speech instead of one intended to rally voters. And while she did offer a more frank assessment of why Harper won the last election – because he offered a clear economy policy, even if it was a wrong economic policy – and had a few good lines, she also veered off into this extended thought exercise of what door knocking in 2015 would be like, and it just went…long and sucked out what energy was left in the room.

And so, when the time tunnel to 1995 opened to deposit Martin Cauchon into the present, his presentation opened with a cartoon featuring socks, and hats, and glasses. “People of the future!” Cauchon began when the cartoon ended. “I come to you from the Liberal glory days of 1995!” Well, not quite. Instead, it was speech to an emptying room that was akin to a has-been eighties band playing their greatest hits at someone’s high school reunion. And to close it off, Cauchon channelled Niki Ashton and dared Stephen Harper to come at him with attack ads, because he would take him down!

And that was it. Liberals have until next Sunday to cast their ballots, and I guess we’ll see what happens. I mean, it’s a pretty foregone conclusion at this point, and the presentations today proved it, but stranger things have happened in the past.

And next time you decide to hold a leadership race, bring in RuPaul and run it like a real competition, because it really was without any real drama, excitement or challenges to hone the eventual winner.