Listening to and reading analyses of the Sunday night political leaders’ debate in Toronto, you wonder if they were at the same debate. Frankly, the analyses were better than the debate. Kathleen Wynne did less than expected. Andrea Horwath was rude and foolish. Doug Ford made you wonder if they had a cardiologist on stand-by.
Collectively, they were less than coherent, unhelpful and were looking like they were trying to remember what their handlers had told them to do.
Doug Ford’s opening statement was a stream of B.S. that was off the wall and you would have to be an idiot to believe any of it. And not even a moderator is allowed to tell a Ford what to do.
Kathleen Wynne’s opening ‘mia culpa’ was insincere and forced. It was too little and too late and pointless.
And whomever dressed Andrea Horwath for the occasion should have added a stethoscope necklace to the costume. You can dress that woman but where would you want to take her? Can you really think of this person as premier?
I have never seen a debate such as this where you cannot imagine even the incumbent looking like a winner. They were all bad.
And what right has Ford to be arrogant? And that was the least of his problems. If he had called the audience “My friends” one more time, I was ready to throw something at the television.
And why was Andrea Horwath so shrill and rude? She talked over everybody else and at times you thought she would never shut up.
As a wrap to a pollsters’ campaign, it was a dud. Ask yourself this: Did the pollsters ever tell you how many people said they were undecided in their various polls? Did they tell you their formulae for balancing the demographics for the parts of the population their polls failed to reach? Did they tell you who answers the telephone in households they are able to reach with interactive voice response (IVR) calling?
Polling is an inexact science. They are supposed to tell you the computed margin of error but I would challenge the interactive voice response people. They call thousands of households and they say their margin of error is as good as the Internet groups and live calling. Are they all equally bad?
The exchanges between the leaders became tedious and I was never sure if Andrea Horwath can sing. I might never find out.
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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry
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