6:02 pm (all times Mountain!): I’m in the sumptuous Palomino Room at Calgary’s BMO Centre, waiting with an audience of about one thousand to witness Sarah Palin’s first live address outside the United States, depending on which media personage in the back row you ask. Calgary is an obvious choice for a test-run of Palin’s ability to win over a foreign audience; her game-slaying soccer-mom persona does resonate here. We’re so close to Alaska, geographically and spiritually, that Palin almost seems like a caricature. For better and worse. She’s familiar… but it must be said that nobody likes having a distorted effigy of themselves waved at them either.

6:16 pm: Calgary Herald editor Lorne Motley introduces… Cliff Fryers, Preston Manning’s former chief of staff, who is here to introduce the lady herself. Fryers suggests that Palin is on a path parallel to that followed by Reform–outsiders who challenged the status quo and were as “mainstream as apple pie” ten years later.

6:19 pm: “Alaska and Alberta!” Palin’s daughter Piper interrupts the first sentences of her speech, as if on cue, and gets a blazing round of applause. Palin talks about constantly having her accent described as “Canadian”. “You did an amazing job” with the Olympics; Canada’s filled with “tough and talented hockey players.” The pandering works.

6:22 pm: Girlish excitement about meeting Shaun White backstage at the Tonight Show.  I didn’t know she’d cast her lot with Leno. Bad move! You’ll lose the youth demographic!

6:26 pm: She’s laying it on a little thick with the pandering and cute gags. Of course she can get away with it, but it occurs to me that I’m not exactly sure what the substantive portion of this speech is supposed to involve. Was there going to be a substantive portion?

6:30 pm: Finally some nuts and bolts. She talks about bringing TransCanada Pipelines in on the Alaska Gas Line project… as part of her goal of helping establish “energy independence” for the United States. She’s kind of bopping back and forth between hitting the independence note and emphasizing what a great business partner and ally Canada is. Which, technically, seems like inTERdependence.

6:33 pm: “I think there’s a little bit of vindication going on for those of us who called for sound science on climate change.” This being Calgary, the applause is enormous. “The all-of-the-above energy policy… is still the one that Americans support, and people are coming back around to our ideas. Our votes didn’t carry the day, and knew that we didn’t get our message across, and it was a tough battle, it really was, but our ideas, people are seemingly more interested today than they were then, and that’s what the Tea Party movement is kind of about…” If I were fast enough to transcribe this with perfect accuracy there would be THOUSANDS of words between the periods.

6:37 pm: “Some leaders in Washington, D.C. aren’t listening to the people.” Some leaders? You got any names for us?

6:39 pm: Fairly extended attack on the Copenhagen climate conference and the IPCC. “We deserve sound science, not data designed to serve political ends.” She rehearses all the recent embarrassments for the Panel for the bedrock-conservative audience.

6:41 pm: Strongest line of the night–most heartfelt–is her description of debt as “immoral”. Her clickety-clack pace of statistics and factoids is held up for a moment as she speaks slowly about the intergenerational unfairness of public insolvency. Soon, however, she returns to her exhausting regular rhythm. It’s a struggle to maintain attention.

6:45 pm: “The hard work of friendship has created an unbreakable bond between Canada and the United States.” Quotes JFK. “I think he would be pleased to see that the bond of friendship does endure. I ask that we continue that, that we preserve it and continue it into the next generation.” Q&A, the fun part, is about to start.

6:48 pm: Here’s Sen. Wallin. With her help. Palin dispenses deftly with the “writing on the hand” thing and the “I can see Russia from my backyard” thing. First things first, I suppose. The former has Biblical warrant (book of Isaiah, people!) and the latter was, or so Palin says, just a Tina Fey quote that got hung on the real candidate. “And she made a lotta money sayin’ it, too,” gripes the Gov.

6:53 pm: More love letter to TCPL. Maybe this should have been held in their boardroom? I really, really want a cigarette. Sen. Wallin is NOT going to be asking the fastball questions this evening.

6:55 pm: Palin says she wanted to go back to being Governor and soccer mom after the campaign but she encountered a “new normal” with a newly hostile press corps. She boasts of finishing her grand ethics reform and goes over familiar ground about how she is “fighting for Alaska in a different way”.

7:07 pm: As you might expect, there are quite a lot of women in the crowd tonight who look vaguely LIKE Sarah Palin. Tall hair with expensive highlights, 20%-more-chic-than-Mrs.-Thatcher jackets, pearls, naughty-librarian wire-frame glasses.

7:08 pm: Wallin getting a little combative, actually inducing a few angry murmurs from the crowd. Pressing Palin a little bit on her “narrow” originalist view of US government, asking her why we should trust her when her paradoxical message is “don’t trust politicians”. Palin says she’s “concentrated on the basics” in every level of government.

7:11 pm: Wallin asks a confused question about Alaska state-government energy rebates; the Q&A suddenly becomes an A for some time as Palin riffs on her battle against corruption and her belief that the citizen is the best judge of his own welfare and the most efficient user of his own earnings. Then she roasts the media for a while. The media responds with, among other things, cranky, impatient liveblogs.

7:21 pm: Q&A ends; Palin vanishes instantly. I’ll cut this off so I can go mingle before the place empties. Will fill in with a proper summation and some actual thoughts a little later. Depending on whether any of my Calgary friends want to go to the bar.

Barring some unnatural disaster of the sort I always regard as certain in the minutes before a trip, I’ll be in Calgary tonight providing live or very-nearly-live weblog coverage of Sarah Palin’s speech and Q&A session at the BMO Centre in Stampede Park. If you’re there, say hi (also, where the heck did you get that kind of money, and can I have some?). If you’re anywhere else in the world, check back here at Macleans.ca for the unfolding details.

Maxime Bernier considers the reaction to his comments on climate change and rallies his supporters.

This is why it is so important to have an open and balanced public debate. This is the very opposite of the intellectual totalitarianism of those who would like to stamp out every dissident voice.

As I said in my Calgary speech some weeks ago, we should be the lobby of the silent majority, this majority which is not represented by the interest groups that we hear about all the time in public debates, but who will pay for the policies being adopted in the end. I encourage all those who feel concerned by this question to make themselves heard, either by leaving a comment on this blog, writing to your elected officials or to newspapers. Thank you to those who’ve done it. I can assure you that you are having an impact.

Jay Hill asks that you stop expecting so much our Olympic athletes.

I’m disappointed by the number of news stories focused on glitches and tough expectations on our athletes … when Alexandre Bilodeau won his event, the pundits obsessed that “finally” we won our first Gold here at home in Canada. What does his success have to do with what did or did not happen in 1976 in Montreal or 1988 in Calgary? … Personally, one of the most rewarding moments of these Olympics so far was the Men’s 1000m speed skating final featuring our very own Fort St. John native, Denny Morrison.  To be in the stands at the fabulous Richmond Oval with thousands of other Canadians hollering and whistling Denny on is an experience I’ll not soon forget. Although Denny didn’t win, I’m sure he’d be one of the first to agree, that just to have qualified to be there, representing Canada … the greatest country on earth … was a victory in itself!  Go Canada Go.

British journalists are not the only ones raising awkward questions about the multitudinous stumbles that have characterized the beginning of the Winter Olympics. They merely attract the most attention, for reasons that have nothing much to do with the truth or falsehood of their criticisms. These reasons include:

1. Cultural cringe: the inherent Canadian awareness of inferiority, and suspicion of condescension, provoked by anything British-accented. No beast is feebler than the Canadian journalist who wraps himself in the flag and rushes tearfully to his typewriter or microphone upon the first hint of perceived sneering at the colonials. Don’t get me wrong: it’s good copy. I saw the technique, used cynically, work like a charm at the ‘01 Athletics Worlds here in Edmonton when a couple of old Fleet Street soaks spoke unlacquered truth about the city’s broad streak of Soviet shabbiness. But to engage on that level is to perpetuate the cringe, and besides, there’s reason 2:

2. Criticisms naturally hit harder when they’re written with great force. British writers are vigorous, direct, unflinching, entertainment-minded, and, in general, better at their trade than ours. (Rest assured—they’ll be, if anything, much harder on their own 2012 Summer Games.) Their newspapers are more fun than ours, pay good writers much more, and are doing better as businesses. They are also rank with ethical failings and obnoxious practices, to be sure, but almost all of those arise from trying too hard to get the story, intruding too far into private matters, competing too viciously, overreacting to perceived injustice. The failings of Canada’s press are all, as a rule, on the other side—the side of compromise, laziness, and political correctness. For instance, look no further than reason 3:

3. Canadian journalists covering the Games have, virtually to a man, accepted the premise that the Games provide an accurate moral, artistic, and technical reflection on Canada as a whole. I don’t remember signing that contract, and if I were going to sign one with a city and its business and volunteer communities, I wouldn’t have chosen Vancouver. Are you kidding? Place is screwy! As it happens, Alberta already staked its international reputation on a Winter Olympics, thanks, and did fine. The rest of you are quite welcome to let yourselves be judged on the basis of this fiasco, but as far as I can see, you haven’t been asked.

I hasten to add that the relative success of the 1988 Games—painfully emphasized by the Great Calgary Zamboni Airlift—is not entirely to Alberta’s credit. After all, Beijing put on a heck of an Olympics, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It put on an outstanding show partly for the reasons I wouldn’t want to live there: crushing social homogeneity, one-party government, lack of civil liberties, central economic planning. If the Games needed a row of shacks in Beijing knocked down, they got knocked down, without a lot of paperwork or argument. If industrial pollution was a problem, mills and factories could be shut down arbitrarily for as long as needed to render the air breathable by gweilo weaklings. Protesters delaying VIP access to the Opening Ceremonies? In China? Forget about it. (Literally: forget about it or you’ll be sent to the laogai for re-education.)

I don’t mean to equate Calgary to Beijing, but the factors that allowed Calgary to succeed as an Olympic host probably did include weak political opposition on the municipal and provincial levels; a small, dominant social-financial elite; a certain degree of cultural homogeneity; and a borderline-inappropriate degree of coziness between legislators, regulators, and judges. What you want in an ideal Olympic city is that it be quite rich, very conformist, and a teensy bit crooked. Calgary wouldn’t be as good a host in 2010 as it was in 1988; it’s a more interesting place now.

And Vancouver may have bitten off slightly more than it can chew, precisely because it’s about the most interesting place in the country, in good respects and bad. It’s not a well-oiled machine, it’s a self-sufficient permanent riot. I have always understood its disorder to be part of its glory. I would have put an Olympics on the moon before I’d have put one there.

Many of you have already found my column from the print edition, in which I try to make sense of Jim Prentice’s Calgary speech. Much hilarity ensues. Okay, not that much.

With 51 precincts reporting specific estimates—restricting the count to media-reported figures and, where available, police counts—it’s possible to account for approximately 21,000 anti-prorogation protestors at yesterday’s rallies. Continue…