Canadian Leaders' Debate Has 'Afterlife'

It was a debate with no clear winner, but the performances of the four party leaders last Friday will ring through the Canadian federal election campaign's holiday cooldown, says University of Toronto political science professor Stephen Clarkson.

"In a way they all won," Clarkson told The Epoch Times following last Friday's English-language debate, which came on the heels of Thursday's French debate. "They all did what they wanted."

And what did they want?

Well, for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper that was to enliven the "stiff" image that plagued him in the 2004 campaign.

"Harper has clearly worked on his performance," said Clarkson. "So he smiles a lot." Clarkson says Harper succeeded in being straightforward, clear, and in not seeming "scary," as opponents have tried to cast him. He expects that Harper will try to show more passion in the second round of debates.

Clarkson said Liberal Leader Paul Martin did well too, made good points, and had a particularly strong and "polished" attack on Duceppe on the issue of sovereignty.

"You are not going to take my country away from me," Martin exclaimed. "This is my country and my children were born and raised in Quebec."

NDP Leader Jack Layton, meanwhile, was "the most aggressive in that he attacked Mr. Martin more consistently," according to Clarkson. And Layton portrayed the NDP as a party that would keep the others honest.

But all in all, there were no big surprises, no big winners, and no big losers. The leaders mainly repeated familiar points that have been heard throughout the campaign.

This is in part because of changes to the debate format that prohibited the leaders from talking over each other. Response times were also enforced by cutting the speakers' microphones.

The new format allowed the leaders to convey their key messages without much interruption. But it gained mixed reviews.

On one hand, the debates were orderly. On the other, some found them dry.

Despite how little substance there might have been in the first round of debates, their importance remains.

"There is an afterlife to debates," says Clarkson. "It doesn't matter whether I saw it. It matters what I see the media say happened."

Clarkson points in particular to Martin's federalist jab at Gilles Duceppe, which came just as many might have thought Duceppe's sole reason in attending the debate was to make life difficult for Martin, as he recited chapter and verse from the report into the sponsorship scandal in which high-ranked Liberals were implicated.

"That little item will probably be played in the media over an over again," Clarkson says of Martin's statement, "because he managed to make his statement with the right amount of passion and without stuttering."

Clarkson says that means for the rest of the holiday, and until the next round of debates, it will "hover in the atmosphere as the last big event of the campaign."

And when that next round of debates does roll around on Jan. 9 and 10 in Montreal, the stakes promise to be higher. It is quite possible that the afterlife of that debate will hover in the air all the way until Jan. 23.