Well I watched pretty much the whole thing. One of the 30,000 or so people who did on YouTube.
Justin showed up. Wore pants, albeit short pants, and sounded like a really quite good university debater. Tom was unctuous. Lizzie was, sorry to say, drowned out. And Steve looked very much like the sort of adult one would want to have as Prime Minister. (And I don’t like Steve.)
No one landed a zinger. No one ran over time. Everyone was quite polite and very Canadian. On my Twitter feed one American who was watching the Republican Gong show could not help but compare and contrast and wish the US had something like the pretty solid debate we had tonight.
My one note is this: Trudeau, Mulcair and Harper all talked over Lizzie May. It grated. I kept hoping that Harper would “white knight” Liz and say something simple like “let her finish”, or “Miss May was speaking”. It would have made Mulcair and Trudeau look like the bullies they so clearly are. It would have been smart politics too. Liz put up a credible performance tonight. Yes, of course she is a lunatic; but she was not wrong on C-51. She is a weirdly decent person and that came through.
Harper could easily have called the other boys to order and demonstrated the real leadership his campaign is trying to project. He didn’t.
It was not a fatal error, but it was an opportunity missed.
Jay Currie 
Thanks for this “assessment”, Jay. I missed the live event, and am just now catching up!
Perhaps it’s because, in previous debates, she had enjoyed the usufuct of talking over her opponents.
Cheers
Isn’t that “usufruct”?
The opportunity was not missed.
It was declined.
She’s made her bed often enough to lie in it.
And everyone knows it.
Including her, finally.
In her closing remarks she seemed to be auditioning for the next debate.
Fully aware of how damaged her brand is.
Death dance of the delusionals. Harper somewhat less delusional, but probably more dangerous. There may be one or two sane minds in the House of communists, but they sure keep their thoughts to themselves much of the time.
We are now two decades into this climate change as political crusade nonsense, and as far as I can recall, not one voice more powerful than three or four conservative bloggers has ever been raised in Canada to question the sanity of this political madness. Sure, we could guess that Harper is a skeptic, but his government goes along to get along.
If your main ambition is to be a colony of the PRC, then you have to bang on the green drum. The only country not forced to follow the green agenda is, surprise, the PRC.
Gung hey fat dividend.