Deconstructing the Debate: Everybody Wins!

The debate might not have yielded a decisive victory for anyone, but there's always the French debate, right? Right?

The consensus on last night's debate seems to be that all four leaders performed as well as expected, with no great revelations coming from any side, says Jonathan Malloy in the Ottawa Citizen. “While it undoubtedly fired up viewers, it's unlikely it changed anyone's mind,” he writes. “[Stephen] Harper fended off the attacks and the debate soon moved on to a race to see which leader could praise immigration the highest.” Above all else, the two-hour showdown likely reinforced whatever voters' views were before. “We should hardly be surprised; every leader except Michael Ignatieff had done this at least three times before. In fact, if the networks ran a tape of the 2004, 2006 or 2008 debates, Canadians might not have noticed unless they caught a glimpse of Paul Martin or Stéphane Dion.”

The National Post's John Ivison decides Harper ostensibly won the debate by not losing his cool, but Ignatieff benefited just by being there. “One suspects many people watching him up close and personal for the first time will have been left with a more favourable impression than they had before the debate,” he writes. But that minor victory won't be enough to tilt polls one way or the other. “Mr. Harper was unflappable in defence of his government’s record on low taxes, jobs and economic growth,” says Ivison. “[Voters] may not agree with some of the things he has done but, by and large, they have not had a negative impact on them personally.”

The puzzling exchange between Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe over Quebec's language laws was likely a preview of tonight's French debate, Patrick Brethour predicts in The Globe and Mail. The NDP gained ground in Quebec since 2008, but at whose expense isn't quite clear. “The days when the Bloc could treat the NDP as a somewhat-sympathetic irrelevancy are gone,” says Brethour. Layton's embrace of a limited role for Ottawa in Quebec affairs has taken away the Bloc's main attack against the federal parties, meaning “if left-leaning Quebecers with only a moderate attachment to separatism park their votes with the NDP, it will be the Bloc that will have to contend with vote splitting in Quebec, for once.”