00:01:39.540I hope that he is able to facilitate a good debate.
00:01:42.840Well, that unfortunately was not the case.
00:01:45.220And it was very clear from the from the outside, from the very beginning, that this debate was going to be a disaster.
00:01:50.840And I don't completely blame Tom Clark.
00:01:54.200I think that he certainly didn't help the way that he sort of interjected himself.
00:01:59.920It almost felt like we were watching six simultaneous interviews of the candidates as opposed to a debate where they have crosstalk and they exchange ideas and they push back against one another.
00:02:10.760I say that I don't entirely blame Tom Clark because this was organized by the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:02:17.540OK, Tom Clark was a person that they chose to sit in the chair and, you know, basically bear the heat and and and keep this thing on time and follow the rules that I believe were set up by the Conservative Party of Canada.
00:02:31.220I don't think that they wanted a lively exchange.
00:02:33.320I don't think they wanted the candidates to be able to get into the weeds about their ideas.
00:02:37.040They didn't want the disputes, the crosstalk.
00:02:39.640They didn't want the candidates yelling at each other because they were embarrassed by the reaction to the first debate.
00:02:46.560The one that was hosted by Canada Strong and Free and moderated by myself and Jamil Giovanni, who is a lawyer, writer, former journalist, former radio host and the incoming president of that organization, Canada Strong and Free, which, as you know, was formerly known as the Manning Conference.
00:03:01.860And I'm going to tell you why I thought I think this.
00:03:04.920There was a piece in Politico this morning.
00:03:07.160It says, Pierre Polyev vows to fire Canada's central banker.
00:03:12.000And in it, there's a little there's a little tidbit here about the debate and about how the room felt.
00:03:17.440So it says right here how the room felt sedate mostly.
00:03:21.280Longtime Tory comms guy Corey Han warned the candidates against a repeat of the Ottawa debate where no holes were barred.
00:03:28.960Civil War, Han said, could haunt the party when future liberal attack ads hit the airwaves.
00:03:35.380And then it went on to say the candidates weren't fired up like they were in Ottawa, where moderators Candace Malcolm and Jamil Giovanni egged on fiery exchanges.
00:03:43.840The crowd didn't bring the energy largely because Clark forbade applause and threatened to take time away from any candidates who inspired hooting and hollering.
00:03:54.340And so then if you go to Corey Han and what he tweeted, he had a thread last week basically just saying, look, the debate that we just had in Ottawa, the one that Jamil and I hosted.
00:04:05.380Basically, there's an attack ad ready for the liberals no matter who wins.
00:04:11.500So this sort of Tory establishment insider guy is saying, hey, guys, the debate was too rough.
00:04:20.000The candidates were given too much of a leash to say what they actually believe, to debate each other, which is, of course, the purpose of a debate, not only to be entertaining, but to learn about the candidates, to find out where they stand on the issues, to see their vulnerabilities,
00:04:31.340to see how they react on stage when being challenged by a formidable candidate, right?
00:04:36.800This is what's going to happen in the general election.
00:05:14.800And again, I don't blame Tom Clark because I think he was given direct orders from the Conservative Party and that a lot of the restrictions were probably from them as opposed to, you know, his own ideas of what he wanted to do.
00:05:25.280But that being said, the whole thing was just uncomfortable to watch.
00:05:29.100And many, many people that I saw commenting on social media said that they just couldn't watch it.
00:05:33.720It was just so bad they couldn't watch it.
00:05:36.680So the first thing that happened was Tom Clark set out these ground rules that basically said that no one in the audience could say anything.
00:06:30.120What is the point of having all those people in a room?
00:06:32.460The purpose of filming these things in front of a live audience is to capitalize on the energy, having people react, knowing where the base stands, you know, who has the loudest applause lines.
00:06:55.640So this whole idea that Clark set up here, that there was no, that there was silence, mandated silence of the audience was just terrible to me.
00:07:05.900Like, there's no point in doing a live debate if you are not going to allow the audience to be part of the debate and feed off of their energy.
00:07:16.500And then, worse off than that, when the crowd sort of ignored Tom Clark and continued to do what they're going to do, which is, hey, this is politics.
00:08:45.600People want to know the authentic opinions of the people on stage.
00:08:49.180But, but in this debate, it was the opposite because we heard from Tom Clark, the moderator, that the questions were given to the candidates in advance.
00:08:56.160So he had an opening question and a closing question that were to do with a candidate's vision of the country, which they were given advance.
00:09:04.300So rather than hearing the sort of, again, authentic views of the candidates, uh, we just got scripted, basically reading of speeches, which is just, again, this is something that the conservative party of Canada probably wants because they want a boring scripted debate where candidates don't go off message.
00:09:19.960And that every, everyone is really disciplined, but as, as a voter and as someone who's trying to determine who the best potential prime minister would be, again, it's not what you want.
00:09:28.300So, so again, just an, another unnecessary, uh, thing that made the debate even worse.
00:09:52.400This is straight out of like talk radio or something.
00:09:54.400This sad trombone would play, which means that the candidate was not allowed to talk anymore.
00:09:59.880So fortunately this only happened twice in the debate, but it was incredibly cringy.
00:10:03.620So here is a clip of the stupid trombone interrupting Scott Aitchison, Scott Aitchison, uh, for the crime of mentioning the prime minister of Canada during a political debate.
00:11:48.760Tom Clark cut each candidate off right when they were making interesting points.
00:11:52.020They each had an opportunity, 15 seconds.
00:11:54.740And then he just moved on to a totally different question.
00:11:56.960And you had serious questions intermixed with the stupidest questions that you have ever heard.
00:12:02.820So if you watched Monday's show where I reacted to media criticism of the debate that I moderated,
00:12:08.200one of the things I mentioned was that Tom Clark sort of became infamous for this interview that he did with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
00:12:16.080back when Justin Trudeau first became leader of the Liberal Party in 2014.
00:12:20.200I said that Tom Clark asked Justin Trudeau this really, really stupid question about what kind of shampoo he used.
00:12:28.080Luckily, our friend Ezra Levant had the clip and he shared it on Twitter.
00:12:31.120So I'm going to share it with you now just so that you get the idea of the sort of journalist that Tom Clark is not necessarily known as like a hard-hitting guy.
00:13:12.800What a disappointing answer this is going to be.
00:13:15.360Whatever happens to be hanging around at the time.
00:13:18.920I just love that clip because Justin Trudeau laughs, right?
00:13:22.340So the stupid question comes out of Tom Clark's mouth, Justin Trudeau laughs, and you kind of expect Trudeau to say, come on, Tom, that's such a silly question.
00:13:30.120But instead, Trudeau takes him completely seriously and says, oh, everyone's going to be super disappointed to learn that I don't use some fancy shampoo as if anybody cares, as if anybody in the entire world cares one iota about Justin Trudeau and his hair products.
00:13:44.940So, again, just Justin Trudeau's ego being fed to an extreme there.
00:13:50.460But I show that clip just to show you the type of mindset of the moderator, Tom Clark.
00:13:56.820And he brought that mindset to the debate last night.
00:14:00.240So we had a whole slew of just absolutely ridiculous questions that were being thrown at these candidates.
00:14:07.200It was demeaning, it was demoralizing, it was insulting to the intelligence of the people who bothered to watch this thing.
00:14:13.340I don't think very many Canadians bother to watch this kind of stuff, mostly because it's so in the weeds and it's not entertaining.
00:14:19.480But this just made it even worse, right?
00:14:21.180These are the kind of questions that you might be interested to hear, you know, if it was a longtime politician who was retiring and you were doing like a farewell interview.
00:14:31.180Or if you had one of these people over to your house for a dinner party and you're trying to get to know them in a different kind of way.
00:14:37.380These are not the questions that you ask a leadership candidate who is trying to lead the country, especially when you cut them off when they want to talk about the important issues like what is the biggest threat facing Canada?
00:14:48.480You cut them off after 15 seconds and then you spend all of this time asking the stupidest questions I have ever heard.
00:14:55.000It was almost like it was designed to embarrass these candidates.
00:14:59.580We heard a question, what book are you reading?
00:15:03.100Look, these guys aren't reading books.
00:15:05.080And it was pretty obvious and that was pretty embarrassing for everybody.
00:15:07.700None of these candidates are reading books.
00:15:09.320And that's fair enough because they are campaigning.
00:15:11.720They are in the midst of a fight for their political careers, the biggest opportunity that they will ever have in their lives likely to lead the Conservative Party and face off against Justin Trudeau in the next election.
00:15:24.340They're going from event to event to event.
00:15:25.980When they have any downtime, they're probably making phone calls to donors and trying to, again, just work on their strategy, work on their speeches.
00:15:35.240So the question of what book are you reading was almost like it was just designed to embarrass them because obviously none of them are reading books right now.
00:15:41.920And we also heard just stupid questions that nobody cares about.
00:16:17.360I really, really wanted one of the candidates to just stand up to the moderator at some point during this ridiculous charade and say, listen, Tom, these are not the important issues facing our country.
00:16:27.260Our country is at a crisis right now, and it is not appropriate to be wasting time on the stage with frivolous questions about what kind of movies we watch.
00:16:36.200Canadians want to know how we're going to deal with these crises, and let's talk about that.
00:16:40.660Let's have more time to talk about, again, the biggest crises facing Canada or our positions on a variety of issues.
00:16:46.880They didn't even talk about housing prices.
00:16:52.760And instead, we wasted this time at what, trying to get to know them.
00:16:56.980Again, just a huge, a huge fail on behalf of the organizers and whose ever idea it was to include this ridiculous slew of superficial questions.
00:17:06.640So here are some of the worst questions that were asked at the debate last night.
00:17:10.860With Mr. Charest, and Mr. Charest, the very first question I have for you is, what book are you reading now?
00:19:25.240He has, you know, such a reach on social media.
00:19:28.260Our reporter, Andrew Lawton, who was in the room, was interviewing people.
00:19:30.980He said that the overwhelming majority of people that he spoke to supported Pierre Polyev and that Pierre is clearly the frontrunner.
00:19:37.620So because of that, all of the candidates were taking shots at Pierre.
00:19:41.380Pierre, if he ever wanted to actually respond and have his own rebuke, he had to use up one of his paddles.
00:19:47.680And so because of that, Pierre used up all of his paddles.
00:19:50.020He had five paddles, according to our researchers here at True North, at the one hour and eight minute mark of a two hour debate, Pierre was silenced.
00:19:57.980Pierre's last paddle was used in a reply that he wanted to make to Patrick Brown.
00:20:03.840And he wasn't allowed to talk again for the rest of the debate, except for his closing remarks.
00:20:08.500So you had a two hour debate in which the main frontrunner candidate, the guy who has the most support out of everyone, is effectively silenced an hour and eight minutes into a two hour debate, which left almost 45 minutes at the end where Pierre was absent.
00:20:24.200And he was just standing there and he couldn't talk and people were attacking him.
00:20:28.560The other candidates were attacking him and he didn't even have the opportunity to defend him.
00:20:32.120I cannot think of a stupider way to organize a debate.
00:20:36.380And I can't help but blame, again, the Conservative Party of Canada for letting this charade carry out.
00:21:14.140Althea Raj of the Toronto Star and the CBC likewise said, having been involved in three debates as a moderator, federal election 2019, federal NDP,
00:21:22.160leadership and Ontario PC leadership, this one is a bit more like a game show.
00:21:27.120So that's a very polite way of saying this thing is not a very serious debate.
00:21:31.700Evan Solomon of CTV, who has also moderated many, many debates, and, you know, he's good at it.
00:21:38.980He is someone who is very credible on these issues.
00:21:42.780He said, why would the Conservative candidates agree to not mention Justin Trudeau's name in opening statements or get cut off by a weird buzzer?
00:22:12.780He said, I think this debate will have little impact on the campaign and makes the organization and the campaigns more important.
00:22:18.540This helps Pierre Polyev and maybe Patrick Brown, but hurts Jean Charest, who needed the debate to make a punch through.
00:22:25.020So it is kind of interesting to see that I think it was pretty clear that the format of the debate was designed to hurt Pierre, to take away his momentum, to not allow the room to cheer him on, and then to cut him off arbitrarily at the one hour and eight minute mark of a two hour debate so that the other candidates could have more of a chance.
00:22:41.500And then here you have Evan Solomon saying the exact opposite because the debate was such a mess, such a gong show, such a train wreck that it won't actually have the impact that the organizers would have wanted, other than maybe the fact that there's no attack ads being cut, which is apparently the only priority of the conservative debate of the conservative party.
00:23:02.860Don Martin from CTV said, far from giving candidates the latitude to compare and contrast their positions, they were shoehorned into soundbites with fairly strictly enforced time limits.
00:23:13.500You simply can't beat a clock, which divides one minute into multiple answers from competing candidates and expects a vote swaying answer from anyone.
00:23:21.420Perhaps if the goal was to discourage discussion from the constant quest for a knockout blow for campaign ads, all that's left to make a show of it are game show questions.
00:23:32.840And so I don't necessarily blame Tom Clark, although I do definitely feel for him because he is getting a lot of heat online there.
00:23:40.100Again, lots and lots of criticism about him.
00:23:41.980Okay, so I know I spent the majority of the show talking about how much I hated the format and how it really, really got in the way of a good debate.
00:23:47.920I'll spend the last few minutes of the show here just talking about the substance of the debate because it was honestly equally as bad.
00:23:55.680The substance of the debate wasn't very good, especially from a conservative perspective.
00:23:59.420What we basically had here was all of the candidates or most of the candidates most of the time doubling down and mirroring and mimicking liberal talking points.
00:24:07.660So we heard that the conservatives, mostly aside from Lesley Lewis, all agree that abortion is great and that there would be no limits on abortion right up until the point of the baby being born.
00:24:18.300So in Canada, none of the front runners in the Conservative Party are willing to even say that they oppose things like late-term abortion, things like sex-selective abortion, a real, real lack of courage, lack of interest in talking about this stuff.
00:24:31.500It was almost like they were all competing and trying to out-compete one another as to who is the most in favor of abortion, which is, again, so far off from where the base is on this issue and where most Canadians and most conservatives stand.
00:24:44.200When it came to immigration, we heard that they all wanted record-high immigration.
00:24:49.160They were all enthusiastically in favor of Justin Trudeau's record-high immigration numbers.
00:24:55.420If anything, Patrick Brown said that they should be even higher.
00:24:58.400The only person who had an ounce of common sense on the immigration question was Jean Charest, who mentioned that, hey, there's no point in having large immigration unless you're going to focus on integration,
00:25:09.960which is making sure that the people who come to Canada settle into Canada, acclimatize to our culture, to our values, and that we have jobs and opportunities for them.
00:25:19.300So at least it was a little bit, what Jean Charest said was a little bit helpful and constructive, but basically these guys are all in favor of Justin Trudeau's reckless immigration policies.
00:25:28.600When it comes to supply management, most of the candidates are in favor of our centralized government-planned, government-orchestrated dairy cartels are all A-OK, according to this crop of conservatives.
00:25:41.840And there was a question, one of the very first policy questions of the whole debate was about Ukraine, which to me is sort of a moot point,
00:25:49.940because none of these people on the stage are going to be leader during this conflict.
00:25:53.740This conflict presumably will end, and so the whole idea of whether you want a no-fly zone or not is completely irrelevant.
00:26:01.100And yet that was the first policy question that was put to them.
00:26:03.600It was sort of cringy to hear all these politicians answer that question.
00:26:06.860The absolute worst answer was Patrick Brown, who enthusiastically said, yes, he would be in favor of a no-fly zone,
00:26:14.660which essentially means that he's in favor of American jets shooting down Russian jets,
00:26:19.220which would turn a conflict into a hot World War III between two nuclear powers,
00:26:24.740an insanely reckless position for a politician to take.
00:26:28.140Totally, totally out of touch as well, because it doesn't matter if Canada wants a no-fly zone or not.