Roundup: Get away from that hot, hot mess of a debate

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The morning wasn’t quite as uneventful as one might have hoped – Justin Trudeau want to a school in Ottawa to talk about provincial cuts and how teachers feared federal ones, while Andrew Scheer announced that the Conservatives would make national museum admission free (which doesn’t really help with affordability, especially as most of these museums are in Ottawa), and that the RCMP Heritage site in Regina would be turned into another national museum. That said, he also took swipes about “political correctness” supposedly “erasing history,” which is false when there is a move to expand the historical record to include effaced minorities like Indigenous people. A few hours later, the Liberals held a press conference to point out that the Conservatives were planning a stunt during the debate to point to a website that would again recirculate the lie about a supposed “capital gains tax” on selling houses, which I will reiterate, is a lie. There is no such plan. That didn’t stop the Conservatives from sounding all-hands-on-deck over social media to circulate this lie over the remainder of the afternoon, and they even had a doctored version of the original recovered Liberal discussion document on their site to eliminate context (which they later had to remove to put the original up once they were called out on it).

And then came the Leaders Debate (not “Leaders’”), at a time slot too early for anyone west of Ontario to really get to watch it (likely so that the private networks didn’t have to unduly inconvenience their American programming). It was a gong show, where in order to accommodate six leaders, all of the exchanges were too short and the questions inconsistent, so most of the time the leaders focused on getting their canned lines out, to hell with the substance of it. And they all said misleading things. Maxime Bernier sucked up too much oxygen for someone who shouldn’t have been on the stage at all but was simply there to act as a spoiler. The whole way this was done, trying to please everyone, pleased absolutely no one, and we are all the poorer for it.

 

Other election stories:

  • What’s that? The various party releases are turning increasingly negative as this election drags on? You don’t say!
  • Dr. Eric Hoskins, who headed up the pharmacare implementation panel, says the amount promised by the Liberals (as a “down payment”) won’t be enough.
  • There are questions as to whether the Indigenous voter turnout will be as high this election as it was last time.
  • The Green Party has dropped one candidate over anti-abortion views.

Good reads:

  • BC Green Party leader Andrew Weaver says he’s stepping down from the leadership and won’t run again.
  • Susan Delacourt wonders how party leaders would fare in a debate with their younger selves, and what changed their views from the time.
  • Andrew Coyne laments the important things that are not being discussed in this election while the trivial things are.
  • Chantal Hébert’s hot take on the debate was that there was no clear winner (but the talk of hung parliaments is perhaps premature).
  • Paul Wells gets his kicks in about the debate format and the leaders’ obsessions with getting their one-liners out.

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One thought on “Roundup: Get away from that hot, hot mess of a debate”

  1. Yeah, the overly rehearsed zingers are bad, but than again your professional lamenting them are all writing them right now and playing those clips. I find journalists always love Rosemary Barton’s style way more than the hoi polloi. I get her thing at the end seem refreshing, but a whole two hours of it would seem off-putting.

    I really hope the NDP don’t run around going, “hey, we had a good debate” as if the public would or should care about that instead of “hey, here are the good things we want to do for you in the House of Commons.”

    I’m guessing Jagmeet Singh’s less courageous tenure in Queen’s Park with such stuff like being sole non-P.C. vote against the sex ed curriculum or banning car insurance discounts based off geography which plays badly in places like Northern Ontario didn’t go down well in the Liberal Party focus groups. Also in the scrum (complete with court ordered White supremist in there) the PM was asked about the few pushbacks on NDP he did make so it would have become a bigger thing if he had done even more?

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