Forgive me for talking shop at first. Thursday’s commission-certified French-language debate was the best-run of the four-ish debates this campaign has seen, and I suspect you’ll read the same conclusion from just about everyone who writes about it.Everyone is praising Patrice Roy, a Radio-Canada anchor and veteran broadcast professional who was the main leader-wrangler at the Museum of History in Gatineau. Properly so.
On to the politicians. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer again stood out by refusing to play nice. He waited a bit longer this time. On Monday it took barely five minutes before he was calling Justin Trudeau a phoney and a fake. Here he waited more than a half hour before using the words menteur and mensonge—liar and lie—perhaps a dozen times in two minutes, again in reference to Trudeau.
In terms of content, two issues particular to Quebec dominated the debate. Not that it was as resolutely navel-gazing as these things sometimes are: there were also good exchanges on medically-assisted dying, China and the economy in general. But this debate also saw the campaign’s best exchange on SNC-Lavalin.
The latest of many, many exchanges on Bill 21, the Quebec law that says teachers mustn’t dress like Jagmeet Singh, was as tense and inconclusive as its predecessors. Singh wants to change hearts, not take the law to court . Trudeau won’t intervene now but might later.
It is my opinion that the Green Party position against Nuclear power is immoral vs their own call of critical climate change. The Green Party rejects the obvious solution, they are non scientific. France got near zero in just 10 yrs of nuclear ☢️ construction.