French Debate

Tried to keep cribnotes, but nothing new was being said, so I started noting behaviour and stuff like that.

During the first hour, there were 2 times, once in a debate with Duceppe, and once with Layton, that Harper nearly blew a gasket.

Duceppe managed to control a lot of the debate through the first hour. During this time Harper looked nervous and was dominated by all 3 of the other leaders. At one point during a debate on taxes with Martin, Harper jumped in and practically shouted "You're talking about numbers. How can you seriously sit there and talk about numbers". He must have realized how dumb that sounded, as he seemed a bit confused as he continued.

Late in the first hour Duceppe to score on Martin by asking repeatedly "How much is left in the EI fund"? Whether you think this was a successful jab at Martin probably depends on whether you're a Duceppe supporter or a Martin supporter.

Second hour, Harper started to calm down a bit. Sometimes too much, as he appeared to be on valium at some points. At the same time Martin seemed as if he was getting frustrated, and he started to rock back and forth a lot as he was speaking.

Layton, meanwhile, was like a peacock the entire time, smiling, animated, like a Canadian Tony Randall. He was effective in his way, kind of like the cheerleader of the debate.

During the last half hour Harper either started to define party policy on the spot, decided to start announcing party policy during the debate, or else he lost one of his marbles.
First, he declared that he would be having a free vote on the issue of gay marriage, then later told Layton that he(Harper) and Layton had opposite opinions on gay marriage. Since Layton is announced as supporting gay marriage, Harper thus said for the first time in the campaign that he is opposed.

And really strange, when Martin asked Harper about the statements that Harper's MPs had made during the campaign about homosexuals and abortion, Harper told Martin that he (Martin) had made the exact same comments 2 days previous. I'm sure, during an election campaign especially, that if the PM came out and declared that gays would not be eligible for public jobs, we'd know about it.

Anyway, this is how I saw the leaders:

Duceppe: confident, very aggressive in a put-offish manner.

Layton: looked calm, no that's not true. He looked like he was on acid or happy pills, all smiley and bouncy. Scored some good points against Harper and Martin

Harper: Trying to control his emotions, sometimes nearly losing his temper. Calmed down later.

Martin: Initially calm and was doing a pretty good job considering he was the brunt of most of the attacks, but later on the attacks seemed to affect his performance.

the end.