Useful in the middle

At least the debate part of the debates went well

Those scroll lecterns were chef’s kiss

Thursday’s English-language debate was not quite 30 seconds old when moderator Steve Paikin finished asking his first question. It reminds me of something I read in Sarah Jennings’ excellent history of the National Arts Centre, that on opening night in 1969 there were no speeches. The first thing audiences experienced was music, theatre, movement. A pro remembers that getting out of the way is an option.

The English debate was probably the best I’ve seen since the 1990s. (It’s on YouTube here.) I still think it’s silly to give people only a minute, and sometimes less, to explain their position on anything, but TV’s gonna TV. Mind you, there’s no rule that says journalists should have a monopoly, or indeed any role at all, in debate organization, there’s just a country full of unexamined assumptions. To his credit, Paikin gave almost all of every minute to a party leader and kept the other leaders, mostly, off the designated speaker’s back, making the the best use of available time. In this, Thursday’s debate went more smoothly than Wednesday’s.

What did we see? Let’s go in ascending order of interest. Yves-François Blanchet seemed tired. Even a gifted talker like the Bloc Québécois leader can find two consecutive nights of debates a challenge, more so when the second is in his second language. In its fourth decade the Bloc can really only make one argument: that it’s handy to have around. That’s a harder claim to sell this year than usual. In an election dominated by arguments for protection on one hand or change on the other, the Bloc can’t deliver protection against Trump and Quebecers couldn’t deliver change from the Liberals, if they even wanted it, by keeping their Bloc MP. Blanchet doesn’t even get along particularly well with Quebec’s wee opposition provincial Parti Québécois caucus, which is popular but more than a year from the next election. So Blanchet was left with his usual reflexive eloquence, interrupted by occasional losses of focus.

Jagmeet Singh interrupted the other leaders more than they interrupted one another. It might have been tactically useful, stomping on some of Pierre Poilievre’s best clips so he can’t use them later. Maybe. I’m also reminded that Singh isn’t the first NDP leader to butt in. “Remember Jabbermouth Jack Layton’s constant interruptions?” Jeffrey Simpson wrote 21 years ago. One of the NDP’s eternal self-assigned roles is the empêcheur de tourner en rond, the person who keeps things from falling into ruts. “I’m here too!” is valid NDP message.

It’s striking that on both nights, Singh logged less time than the other leaders on the how-much-time-did-they-talk clock. On Wednesday he complained, effectively I thought, that he was being kept from talking. But the other theory is that when it actually was his turn, he didn’t have much to say. There’s simply more detail in the air when Pierre Poilievre is debating Mark Carney than when Andrew Scheer debated Justin Trudeau. Detail isn’t Singh’s field. He clearly distinguished himself on Wednesday as the leader most sympathetic to Palestinians in Gaza, and there’s a market for that in Quebec. He reminded everyone on Thursday that he talks to people who are struggling. Vote for that if it impresses you.

Mark Carney is sometimes a terrible public speaker. I remember a dinner where we all milled around afterward, asking variations on “What the hell was that?” But in Montreal he decided to be Carney rather than trying to be whatever Justin Trudeau always tried to be: brisk, relatively formal, trying to make his points rather than tug anybody’s heartstrings. Basically the play here is that he’s Louis St. Laurent. I think his three-point plans actually wear better than the attempts to transform him into Mike Myers’s Fun Pal.

On both nights he and Poilievre were peddling competing transparent fictions. Poilievre’s claim is that Carney was the architect of JustinTrudeauism. Carney’s is that he “just got here,” as he put it on Wednesday, and cannot be held responsible for anything that happened in Canada before March. Poilievre should saw off the difference, rather than trying to put Carney into specific rooms on specific days in 2018. It’s a weakness of Poilievre’s insistence on personalizing things, like the way he turned a generalized collapse in Canadian state capacity into a mostly wasted four-month campaign against “Justin Trudeau’s McKinsey pals.”

The knock on Carney that people have any time for isn’t that he spent the last decade holding a puppeteer’s stick up the back of Trudeau’s suits. It’s that he’s a type, and all the other types will keep running rampant, running on a decade’s muscle memory, while he’s in his office writing three-point plans. That’s the fear I wrote about in L’actualité this week. I’m not sure why Poilievre hasn’t been showing up at campaign stops with life-sized cardboard cutouts of Chrystia Freeland, Steven Guilbeault and Jonathan Wilkinson. Didn’t Western populists use to know how to do show business?

On Thursday Poilievre had the best night he’ll ever have in politics unless he is very lucky for the next ten days. He did it by reminding himself — at last, perilously late — that his job isn’t to make Mark Carney sad, or to get clicks on phones, or to go very far out of his way to punish armies of Conservatives for being the kind of Conservatives Jenni Byrne doesn’t like. Like Paikin, but in a different way because he has a different job, he remembered that he had come to Montreal to work.

He spoke to voters in their homes. Sometimes it was shtick. “For a change.” Sometimes it wasn’t. My voice sometimes breaks when I speak about emotional things in public, so I believe that’s what we heard from Poilievre near the end. His entire selling proposition, for a quarter century, has been that he’s your guy in Ottawa. After letting himself be too often distracted, he remembered to make that point again. I offer no prediction for the home stretch.

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Terry Glavin has a good piece about the chaos that swirled around the debate. As is often the case with Terry, the best stuff is below the paywall.

It’s too easy to blame the debate commission for all this. I never thought there should be a debate commission, but it’s not like the debate commission caused COVID, sometimes bad things just happen. I used to kind of like Ezra Levant until I learned it was simply impossible to get him to stop lying about me once he decided it was fun. I believe much of what he does isn’t journalism. He has sometimes argued as much in court. I believe very strongly that the popular, “Well, if you say blah blah blah about Ezra, then you have to say blah blah blah about the CBC” construct is unpersuasive. Please send him money if he’s closer to your truth, Lord knows he’ll make it easy for you.

If I were Poilievre, I wouldn’t want Rebel News as my copilot for the next 10 days, but one sleeps in the bed one makes. For two hours on Wednesday and two on Thursday, four reasonably skilled political professionals made their best case for your vote, and especially in the case of Poilievre and Carney, the best was good. Now everything else comes crashing in. Best news for last: You get to vote.