Debate, eh?

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.

Security

NDP leader Tom Mulcair 

Apparently the Lying Jackal is stuck in an airport and he writes,

Bottom line, as noted above: most of the job in politics, now, is simply getting people to pay attention. My hunch is that the hue and cry about that CPC/ISIS/JT ad has helped to achieve the mission’s key objective: i.e., to get the electorate to pay attention in the sleepy Summer months and agree, yet again, that Justin Trudeau “just isn’t ready” to deal with the Satanic horrors that seemingly occur daily in this world.

That may make you mad. That may leave you outraged. But it’s unlikely you were ever part of the audience the CPC had in mind when they did the thing up on some staffer’s computer, for about ten bucks.‎

Oh, and why was I stuck in the WestJet waiting area, for hour after hour?

Because the airline had been targeted by a bunch of bomb threats in recent days, that’s why. ‎People getting hurt jumping out of planes, planes getting grounded so the cops can search for bombs.

Hope and fear: they work.

Fear works particularly well when, you know, it corresponds with reality. lying jackal

He is referring to the now notorious CPC ISIS ad. Which will, having done its job, be forgotten by October. But there is a larger picture emerging which the CPC will be mining for the next few months. It is about headlines.

Greece Collapses/China’s Markets in Freefall/Vancouver Housing Prices in Orbit/Ontario Bond Rating one grade above Junk/Fire Engulfs West/Drought!/ISIS battles Egypt/Refugees Flood Italy/Iran Outwits Obama/Putin outwits Obama/Mexicans outwit Obama/Missing IRS emails found on Hilary’s Private Server (OK, I made that one up)….

Write your own. If they are not true they soon may be.

At the moment the world is a rather hostile and confusing place. Central banks and governments are out of bullets when it comes to the next financial crisis. Canadian housing prices – in Vancouver and Toronto – have hit heights where even the people who own the houses are beginning to wonder if this is all a bubble. There are real terrorists in the world and they certainly have the capacity to land on European and likely North American soil.

Much as Canadians may loathe Harper, and many do, the question of security, broadly defined, is a huge factor in the next election. Taking a flyer on Justin is emerging as a non-starter. Mulcair? Perhaps if the economy was booming or the terrorists back in their caves he’d be a grand alternative to Steve the Dull. But right now?

The oil patch is trying to adjust to $50-60 oil prices. We’re running a significant trade deficit. The Canadian dollar is weak. We’ve had a couple of lone-wolf, ISIS inspired, if not directed, terrorist attacks. Is this the time you want to trade the bland, but largely competent, Harper for the untested Mulcair and his band of one term MPs?

The CPC does not have to sell Harper. We know exactly what we are getting. But the NDP has to sell Mulcair and, as they do, they open up his flanks to the doubt ads the CPC will run. We know Justin isn’t ready. Is Mulcair? Plant that question in the minds of a nervous population and Harper wins in a romp. Not because people like him, not because people embrace the CPC’s limited vision for Canada, rather because in conditions of uncertainty “change” is terrifying.