Quote:
Originally Posted by crazy_eoj
Easy to see why the Liberal vote is slipping to the NDP. Who runs on a deficit budget!?
|
Well, the NDP are too, really; they're just lying about it.
Anyway, just to type out my thoughts somewhere so I can crystallize them, this thread seems to be a reasonable place.
Trudeau: I really dislike this guy. His cutting off of the other two, his interjections while they were speaking, really annoyed me. I kept wanting the moderator to tell him to pipe down and wait his turn.
He also frequently gives the impression that he doesn't quite grasp the issue he's talking about, as if someone has explained it to him and how he should present it, but he hasn't entirely absorbed it.
You also could have played a drinking game with that "worst record since ww2 and depression" line he used. There was a lot of that kind of rhetorical fluff and particularly early in the debate, very little substance offered.
That said, I do not usually decide who I'm voting for on whether I like the leader, and I won't this time, either. I have no conceptual issue with deficit spending in a recession, especially on infrastructure. I'm inclined to agree. What I'd like to hear is a plan besides that for after what his "optimism" states is going to be a recovery by I guess 2019. Okay, the roads are fixed... what now? That's less a criticism and more of an "I like the concept in theory, but it needs more". I need to read the platform, obviously, but what he was stressing as important to him, I was on board with. I also liked the overriding message of being flexible in terms of leaving certain issues to provinces.
Mulcair: Way less of the "creepy" factor than in the first debate, though it started to come back towards the end. A lot of his answers had great delivery and great pacing (as opposed to some of Trudeau's which felt rushed and less organized in comparison). I really thought that in the sense of debate performance he probably won the thing. Had a few good sound bites thrown in, to boot. Overall, he sounded like a guy with a firm grasp of the issues and his party's position on how to approach them.
Unfortunately, I totally hate a lot of the policy message. First, this "stock option loophole" isn't a loophole, it's a policy-based provision that treats options consistently with their character. The gain is deferred until it's realized, that reflects reality. It's not a loophole if it's intentional. The NDP answer here is unabashedly, "raise more revenue by doing away with this, at the expense of fairness". The other side of that is, there is no way that change to the tax act raises the revenues he wants. Trudeau is clearly right about what's going to happen if they get into office - "Oh, the situation is worse than we thought, we ARE going to have to run a deficit after all". I don't think much of the child care policies, strongly dislike the minimum wage and think the energy plan sounds like a disaster. Again, I'll read the platform but from what I'm hearing (and to be fair you can't give a detailed economic plan in a debate format) it is not sounding likely that I'll vote for these guys.
Harper: Someone above said "Harper was Harper", which about sums it up. Generally what he says strikes me as reasonable, even if cast in a favourable light for his party, and the criticisms of his opponents also struck me as generally fair. It didn't hurt that he also seemed like the only guy unwilling to interrupt or talk over his opponents. That being said, I can't think of a single really good moment for him. It was his usual sort of bland, I-can't-find-anything-to-complain-about-here-but-neither-am-I-moved performance. He gave no impression that there were any brilliant new ideas coming to spur the economy or anything of the sort, it was just even keeled, steady as she goes "prudence is the best option" stuff. I have no reason to expect anything but "more of the same" here.
I'm still not totally decided, but I don't know that a debate like that can really be expected to change anyone's position substantially. It was more or less a tie. I would say for me, of the three, Trudeau performed the worst but on an economy-based debate he may still have exceeded expectations relative to the other two and won on handicap. No earth-shaking moves will result from this, in my estimation.
