Some Observations on the Federal Leaders Debate

The media is saturated with reports, analyses and score sheets listing who won or lost, so I won't add to any of that. Instead I'll give a few impressions I walked away with after sitting there for two hours.

In business I've learned that when you are making a pitch or even giving a reasonably lengthy talk or presentation each member of the audience is likely to walk away with a memory of only one message. Your job as the speaker is to decide on that one message, communicate it and make it stick. I'll try here to distill my own take-aways after hearing them speak and debate.

Harper: I would have thought that after the experience of the French language debate that, as many anticipated, Harper would be more aggressive. He wasn't yet I believe he should have been. He was quick on the uptake but bland in both responding to the others' attacks and in his own challenges to the others. This obsession with appearing 'prime ministerial' is fine, but I think Canadians liketo see a little more fight in their politicians. We are a hockey nation after all. However it was his slipperiness when pestered about his past utterances of quite extreme policies (predating the previous election) like on Iraq, the poor, health care and so on, that made a lasting impression on me. He kept dodging those questions when he should have taken them head on, and defused those concerns, by speaking about how he has to represent the broader population and how he has learned the importance of doing so. I know he can do it since he has done it. Last night he didn't. The other message I got was that he has no broad election platform for the Conservatives. He was entirely non-responsive to well-delivered barbs from the others on this. It leaves the impression that this election is for this personal ambitions.

Dion: He came across as calm and assertive but never rude. Frankly I expected him to stumble badly and he didn't, even with the reports I heard of how well he did the previous evening. He did only a fair job in communicating and defending his plans and policies, but stood out from the others by having a pretty clear program in mind. Like with Harper I think he could have been more aggressive, though perhaps it was enough for many people to see that he has some strength of character. The key message I took from this is his character. Before this I had grave doubts that he has what it takes to be Prime Minister. Now I am reassessing my opinion of him.

Layton: This is a man and party frozen in time. No matter the situation the country is facing they keep reiterating the same program and messages. It's as if they can't see past their ideals to deal with the real world. Layton comes across to me as disconnected. This is despite his honest concerns on the gutting of Canada's industrial base. He continues with his 'tax the rich and tax the corporations' with no sense of understanding of how the economy works. This is old news and so not the message I left with. The impression he left me with came from his continuous interruptions and heckling of Harper and Dion. That kind of bad behaviour makes the others look even better than they are while make Layton look like boorish. This is no prime minister.

Duceppe: He was of course under the least pressure and could speak his mind frankly and even with some humour. Despite the Bloc's peculiar position I always find that refreshing. His key message was not sovreignty but rather that provinces should get preeminence over federal powers, especially in domains which are constitutionally assigned to the provinces. He did quite well in getting that message across, and how the federal government keeps undermining provincial powers through taxation and transfer payments, with those payments dependent on subordinating provincial programs to federal direction.

May: For a neophyte May handled herself quite well. Despite this I saw two important problems with her performance. First, for a party that is still poorly understood she has the burden of crafting a vision of the Green Party that everyone can easily grasp. I did not see any such message last night. There were lots of interesting tidbits but she failed to wrap it in the cloak of a clearly-articulated strategic whole. It may exist but I didn't hear it. However I think her worst error was at the very end. When the leaders were asked about their very first priority should they form the government, May chose to focus on proportional representation. I was stunned. With all the problems we face she chose to give priority to her party's selfish needs. I still can't get over how she could have made this blunder.

On a final note I want to mention a couple of things about the moderator. I give him a strong thumbs up on how well he managed the debaters and keeping the proceedings orderly, on topic and on time. That was very refreshing. The one thing that grated was his twice (at least) grovelling to popular entertainment culture with his ridiculous references to the concurrent US debate and how ours is, perhaps, almost as interesting. This isn't about entertainment; this is about our country. Does he have an inferiority complex about his Canadian-ness? I don't.