The French Debate
Unfortunately the candidates were switching between languages faster than the translators were able to keep up, so I missed quite a bit of what was said. It would have been much easier, and I wouldn't have missed as much if they hadn't provided translation.

Well. There certainly were a few surprises. Mr Grafftey was easily the most passionate of the candidates, in his opening remarks he lit into Peter Mackay for something his campaign had done. Mr. Grafftey became so passionate that for a moment it looked like he was going to break down into tears, and it looked like he was going to walk off the stage as he finished. But I don't want to denigrate Mr. Grafftey's performance, he did very well and I was very impressed.

Mr. Chandler, whose campaign is based around the idea of uniting the right, was another story. As I was keeping notes during the question sections, Mr. Chandler's responses were so predictable that I just started writing "blah blah blah" in my notebook. For just about every question, from how to deal with Paul Martin to how to attract minorities and women, Mr Chandler's response was that we need to unite with the Canadian Alliance. The only exceptions were regarding the Iraq war, when he called Canadians "anti-American", and the gay marriage issue, in which he expounded traditional family values. Essentially what Mr. Chandler proposes is that we unite with the Alliance, under Alliance values and Alliance policy. Yeah, right.

Mr. Orchard would have been much more impressive if he hadn't continued to launch into his tirades against the Americans. I personally am upset with the Yanks right now because of the Iraq war, but I certainly disagree with some of Orchard's claims, like the suggestion that Paul Martin would seek to adopt the US dollar. Mr. Orchard believes we need to safeguard our Canadian institutions (Air Canada for instance), a statement I agree with. But where I disagree with Orchard is that he believes that every conservative politician, including Paul Martin, has some secret agenda to sell Canada to the cheapest bidder in the States.

Jim Prentice is a good solid Tory, who incidentally I was supporting before Mr. Bachand entered the race. He shares a lot of his vision for the party with Mr. Bachand, but being from the west his focus seems to be a bit more on attracting the Alliance vote. Mr. Prentice is correct when he says that we must stop treating the CA as if they are "radioactive". In fact from a fiscal perspective I think that Mr. Prentice would feel fairly comfortable in the CA. Which isn't a bad thing, I am a fiscal conservative myself, although I think that the CA focuses too much on tax cuts and not enough on debt reduction.

Scott Brison. Actually he's going to be here in Brampton tomorrow morning for a breakfast thing, and I've been asked to go. Unfortunately I have a stupid meeting so I can't. I won't spend much time on Mr. Brison, because his comments on the middle east are so incredibly poorly thought-out that I can't stomach him. Mr. Brison is opposed to Kyoto, as are most of the candidates. The one thing that impresses me the most about Scott Brison, is that he believes that churches should be allowed to define the marriage issue, and that same-sex marriage isn't a priority for the government. This is impressive because.. never mind. Mr. Brison is another fiscal conservative, and during the debate he was one of the first to tell Mr. Orchard that his ideas are welcome in the party.

Conventional wisdom holds that Peter Mackay is going to win the leadership of the party, although I am not so sure. I've always liked Peter Mackay, and he deserves credit today for having improved his French to the point where it was barely an issue during the French debate. I have to wonder sometimes at Mr. Mackay's judgement though. As a front-runner for the leadership of a major political party, he shouldn't allow himself to get drawn into the petty arguments so easily. And his answers to the questions were often empty of any content, which I guess is good practice for if he ever becomes a government minister, but not very good for the leader of the fourth place party in the House. For example, on the question of how would we attract minorities, he said basically "we must attract minorities". Unfortunately that tells us nothing.

And Andre. I still believe that Andre is the candidate that has the best chance of winning us a whole bunch of seats. The man wants the job, he wants it. Today I got the impression that at least a couple of the other candidates were borrowing ideas from the Bachand policy book, especially Mr. Bachand's plan to bring Quebeckers into any new coalition with other conservatives and other former party members. Mr. Bachand was the first to say that war is a bad solution to the Iraq problem. And in a debate that was often acrimonious, Mr. Bachand remained cheerful and in fact his rapier-wit transformed portions of the debate, and reminded me that this was part of the process for choosing someone who will be in a position to possibly become Prime Minister of a G-8 country.
While the other candidates were having trouble with the question about how to bring women and minorities into the party (guess what Chandler's solution was...), Mr. Bachand didn't try to avoid the question with a verbal fog (like a couple of the others). Instead he met it head on with a joke. He looked at himself and all of the other candidates and suggested that they were doing a casting call for the movie "Men in Black 3". He then addressed the problem of not enough Francophones in the party (OK, he probably doesn't get points for that one), and the image that we are a closed party that doesn't accept you if you're not a WASP. Bachand suggested that we would have done better in Quebec during the last election, except that we weren't organized enough to capitalize on Joe's strong performances in the debates.

And my favourite Bachand comment during the debate was addressing the question of David Orchard's role in the party. Mr. Clark had called Mr. Orchard a "tourist" in the party back in 1998, so Mr. Bachand offered Mr. Orchard a "Tourist Visa", demonstrating that Mr. Bachand believes that Orchard is part of this party, and his ideas are welcome even if the majority of us disagree with him.

Everything else aside, I think Mr. Grafftey won the debate. His passion and populism are something that this party could really use. Unfortunately it’s a bit much to expect that he could ever win an election for us when even Tories don’t know who he is. My prediction is that Mr. Grafftey will be the next to leave the race and throw his support behind the Bachand campaign. Unfortunately he doesn’t have any delegates to bring over with him…