Trudeau rivals must land debate punches
MONTREAL— Justin Trudeau may have to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory to lose the Liberal leadership campaign but for that to happen his rivals will have to start closing the gap that has so far made this race a very lopsided one.
For the eight men and women who are competing against Trudeau, the task of levelling the playing field really begins on Sunday, when the Liberal party kicks off a round of five leadership debates in Vancouver.
It may sound like a tall order but it also means that Trudeau may be the only one who has anything to lose in the debate round.
If the recent past is any indication, the fact that it will be a nine-way debate ultimately offers a leading candidate only a small measure of cover.
At the time of last year’s NDP leadership campaign, party strategist Brian Topp entered the debates with sterling endorsements from New Democrat luminaries such as former leader Ed Broadbent and former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow. But that was not enough to put fears about his lack of elected experience to rest.
On the contrary, Topp’s lowimpact performance at the debates suggested that as leader, he would face a steep learning curve in question period and on the election trail.
His campaign started losing momentum the moment he went on the debate stage and never recouped it.
For his part, Trudeau has been known to give solid solo performances. And he is a master at working a room. But based on performance in the House of Commons to date, no one would describe him as a parliamentary force or a model of intellectual gravitas.
He also has a documented tendency to venture out onto precarious limbs. His clumsy attempt to take his distance from the gun registry — to use just one example — suggests that he may need more scripting than a debate format allows.
But Trudeau is not the only candidate who will find himself tested on Sunday.
In the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign, Ken Dryden’s lack of proficiency in French sank his bid right on the debate podium. Ditto for Paul Dewar in the more recent NDP campaign. In a line-up that features three impeccably bilingual francophone candidates from Quebec, the burden of language proficiency will be heavier on the six anglophone ones. Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Jack Layton did not hold seats in Parliament when they became federal leaders. But there is a difference between not having a seat and having failed to keep or win a riding with a decent Liberal history as Martha Hall Findlay and Martin Cauchon did in 2011. At a time when the party is looking for electoral salvation, a hit-and-miss track record on that score is a liability that may prove hard to overcome. In the NDP campaign, Nathan Cullen championed the idea of an electoral coalition between the New Democrats and the Liberals. The proposal was disliked by the party establishment. It went against the grain of a membership that was still buoyant from its second-place finish in the last election. Still, Cullen stuck to his guns at the debates and while he did not win the leadership vote, he did a lot better than anyone initially expected — beating veteran MPs such as Peggy Nash and Dewar for third place. All of which is to suggest that in a leadership campaign, a candidate is as likely if not more to be re- warded for a demonstrated capacity to communicate his ideas than for the ideas themselves.
That’s a lesson that former astronaut Marc Garneau and Vancouver MP Joyce Murray will have to master if they want to advance their respective bids in the debates.
Finally, leadership debates matter almost as much to the other parties as to the one holding them.
Conservative, NDP and Bloc Québécois strategists will all be watching Sunday’s debate to get a glimpse at what makes the next Liberal leader tick but also to gather potential material for future negative ads. Chantal Hébert