Being as obsessed as I am about politics it is no surprise I tuned in to the Leader's Debate tonight, featuring the 4 major parties. Nothing too surprising or exciting happened, and I actually found myself tuning out towards the end with very little conflict or drama. Some of the one on one debates, particularly the ones with Duceppe were just some policy agreement. Except of course when he was vs. Harper at the beginning, immediately putting a shot across the bow challenging Harper on the most recent Conservative scandal, where the auditor general questioned 50 million dollars in spending on the G8 summit. As usual, Jack Layton seemed to perform the best out of anyone with some very good points made, challenges issued and shots taken on both Harper and Ignatieff. Gilles was sidelined pretty much most of the rest of the debate, and I've been told that he tries much harder during the french debate because obviously more Quebecers will be tuning in to that. Ignatieff, while an intelligent debater and a pretty smart guy that I can respect, did drop the ball a couple of times, able to issue smart arguments but failing to put an emotional punch when he was agressing Harper.
Steven of course played his normal role of prudish miserly grandmother, chastising the other party members for not supporting him and mindlessly repeating his droning argument that he wants to continue his "work" even though he was found in contempt of parliment and routinely hides things from parliment and taxpayers, and has a party composed of corrupt and dishonest hypocrites. He constantly ignored direct questions and repeated his mantras, hoping the Canadian public is too dumb to pay attention to his invalid arguments.
Like I said, Layton was great in my opinion. I really had no heart for the NDP until I had seen him in the 2008 debates - he does a really great job and stands apart from the two major party cardboard cutouts. He made some great points, like "What happened to the old stephen harper who wanted to come to ottawa and clean up government?", kept on track in answering the initial debate questions with straightforward answers, and even stuck up for Elizabeth May getting left out of the debates and made a good argument for proportional representation:
The Bloq and Green party got about the same amount of votes but the green party didn't get any seats, proportional representation can more accurately represent Canada's ideals and wishes for government. I agree that our government needs real fundamental change in how it is run. Stephen thinks the answer is a majority government, but that will just help him ram his agenda through and will end up pissing off a majority of Canada in the end. A system where more views are represented, and where parties are FORCED to work together to form policy that works for everyone. Possibly even a component similar to Switzerland where citizens are able to regularly vote on important issues and keep their parlimentary representatives in check and more accountable for policy decisions. We can all agree that the world has been changing too much to think that old ways of doing things are still functional, and besides it would also be pretty awesome.
