Come on, get angry

Fred Greenslade/Reuters

It was selfless of Canada’s broadcasters to showcase the political party leaders with an English-language debate that couldn’t possibly be mistaken as a showcase of the broadcasters’ own abilities. The show could not have been less impressively produced if the leaders had skyped their jabs and parries in from an Internet café. I spent the first three minutes of the debate frantically switching channels because I couldn’t believe the cavernous echo-chamber sound was the official audio feed from the floor.

As for the set: corrugated metal, beige ’70s colours—at last I realized why it all looked so familiar. The broadcasters had stationed the leaders of Canada’s political parties in front of the tour bus from The Partridge Family. A subliminal message, perhaps. The old TV comedy’s theme song—Come On Get Happy—was an extended warning against fratricidal bickering. “We have a dream, we’ll go travelling together / We’ll spread a little loving and we’ll keep moving on / Something always happens whenever we’re together / We get a happy feeling when we’re singing a song.”

Yeah, not so much. These four couldn’t bear the thought of travelling together much further than they’ve come so far. The tone was set in the first exchange by Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe, in the pesky teenager role originally played by Danny Bonaduce. Stephen Harper answered one of the pre-recorded questions from an ordinary voter that have come to characterize these debates. “I would like to congratulate Mr. Harper for answering a question from a citizen,” Duceppe said, “for the first time in this campaign.”

That pretty much set the tone for the night: chippy and accusational. Later, Jack Layton, the New Democrat, asked Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal, why Ignatieff missed 70 per cent of the votes in the last session of Parliament. Layton mocked Harper’s tough-on-crime policies: “I don’t see why we need so many more prisons when the crooks seem happy in the Senate.”

Ignatieff asked Harper why ordinary Canadians have found themselves getting booted from Conservative rallies during this campaign. “What are you afraid of? Why are you afraid of the Canadian people?”

So the first serious news out of this debate is that the other leaders were so eager to tear a strip off one another, and so desperate to goad Harper into displaying his legendary temper, that the Prime Minister (for Harper is still that, and it will soon become an important detail indeed) was able to rise above the fray by refusing to take part in it.

Harper acted a little less like a talk-show host on Xanax than he did in the sit-down, everyone-at-the-same-table debates of 2008, at which he kept calling his opponents by their first names and fixed the Green party Leader Elizabeth May with the pleasantly dazed expression his advisers later called the “icy blue eyes of love.” That time he went so far overboard with his pacifist shtick that he seemed to have mentally checked out, and his polling lead in that election briefly suffered. This time he permitted himself to show a little flint now and again. But this was his fourth English-language leaders’ debate since he became leader of the united Conservatives in 2004. He has long since learned that he cannot win by shutting the others down, so he used this debate to explain how, at least in his view, he has run a moderate, collaborative government.

“Canada’s got the strongest economy on Earth and suddenly it’s plunged into the fourth election in seven years and nobody can say why,” he said at one point.

To say the least, that’s not how Harper’s opponents see it. Ignatieff accused him of abandoning Canadian families to spend billions on “jets, jails and tax cuts.” Layton wondered whether his wife Olivia Chow’s family could have immigrated to Canada if Harper had been prime minister then. The Conservative leader had to spend a large part of the night denying the premises of their attacks. “This is simply not true,” he said, and, “The contrary is the fact,” and, “I simply don’t accept the truth of those attacks,” and more of the same besides.