Spare me another national leaders’ debate! Please!
Leadership debates are mostly a waste of time. Excruciating. Surely only masochists enjoy them.
There are few surprises. If you’re a partisan praying your favourite party leader won’t mess up, they’re grimly suspenseful, but usually a relief at the end, which always takes far too long to arrive.
If your fingers are crossed your guy will deliver a major put-down, hammering their chief opponent, you’re pretty well guaranteed to be disappointed.
Professional political strategists have developed coaching candidates how not to mess up into a near science – even real dummies can be saved from serious pratfalls most of the time. This ensures leadership debates are at the least boring, often stultifying.
Chances are good we’re never going to see another moment like Brian Mulroney telling John Turner that, “You had an option, sir,” in our lifetimes.
For that to happen, two factors are necessary: One candidate has to blunder badly; another has to be quick enough jump on it. This gets less likely each year as the methodology for drilling candidates not to say anything devastatingly dumb keeps improving. And as for candidates who are quick enough to respond, old video clips and social media posts will end most of their political careers before they start nowadays.
No, if you want to see a politician get creamed by another politician, go to a charity boxing match.
Anyway, one thing about those rare moments when someone actually does get smacked – “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy!” – is that if the planets do all line up, it’ll be played and replayed so many times that by the end of the week you’ll have it all memorized for the rest of your life anyway.
The conventional wisdom about the English-language debate last night in Montreal was that all Prime Minister Mark Carney had to do to win was not mess up. He didn’t mess up. In particular, he didn’t mess up on the question on all of our minds: How do you solve a problem like The Donald? Ergo, he won.
The conventional wisdom was basically right – the guy’s got serious dad vibe and the you’re-just-like-Justin-Trudeau shots slid off him like the proverbial water off the proverbial duck.
Beyond mere entertainment, if you view these things as a pedagogical exercise, you can spare us the civics lesson. They don’t have much educational value either.
There was Pierre Poilievre trying not to sound like a snotty political science sophomore with a mean streak and a cartoon villain’s voice. At this point in this campaign was anyone other than Conservative true believers going to be persuaded he was actually a grownup just because he mostly kept his worst instincts in check for a couple of hours? Probably not.
To tell you the truth, if I’d been his debate coach, I would have told him just to go wild and go for the throat, because at least that would have made better TV and persuaded his party’s base to resist the temptation to drift off to the People’s Party of Canada again.
Whatever happens on April 28, Poilievre might as well have made a performance out of showing how he managed to piss away at 20-plus-point lead in the polls. Instead, he just set the stage for Carney to sound like Canada’s dad, smile gently, and explain politely that “you spent years running against Trudeau and the carbon tax, and they’re both gone.” (Sotto voce: …, Son.)
The faltering NDP’s Jagmeet Singh? Well, at least he had the decency on occasion to sound desperate – which, come to think of it, he should. He described himself as scrappy.
Yves-François Blanchet? I’m pretty sure the Bloc doesn’t have a candidate here in St. Albert, even if half the street names are French.
And then, this being the age of the pre-apocalyptic internet, when it’s all over the various campaigns will carve out tiny clips of their candidates saying something reasonably coherent and play them over and over to their algorithmic silos on social media, the better to play Stop The Steal in the event they lose the election.
They’ll all say their guy won the debate, decisively. Which is fair, I guess, in a sport where they don’t give out attaboy participation ribbons. This is known as spin.
And then there are the organizers of these things, like the Leaders Debate Commission, which excluded one political party with MPs in the House of Commons at the last minute because it’s only running 232 candidates while welcoming another that’s running 78. Yah, I know about the percentage rule. Sorry, don’t care.
Well, at least that eliminates the danger of a powerful debate by a feisty amateur thespian whose party has no seats at all in the House turning the whole affair on its head and actually generating some interest, as happened in British Columbia in 1991.
Oh, and then letting hordes of pretend reporters working for mysteriously funded right-wing advocacy groups elbow out the real journalists from The Canadian Press and whatever else is left of the media, for heaven’s sake.
No, just spare us the pain. No Mas!
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Nick Seebruch, editor
