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Bang bang.

Let’s get this out of the way because it’s apparently necessary.

I’m a gun owner.  I own guns.

Took the course, passed, got a gun.  Now own guns, plural.  I know how to use them. Trigger locks, gun safes, secure and separate storage: know all that, too.

But if I were still running the war room of the federal Liberal Party — and I was, in the ones where we won big majorities in 1993 and 2000 — this gun owner would be sitting in front of computer screen in downtown Ottawa this morning, typing up a script.

We’d be using the script to produce an ad that would run in every urban centre in Canada, over and over, until people could recite it by heart.  It would show footage — some old, some not so old — of bodies being carried away.  Canadian bodies.

Then the narrator’s voice — a woman’s voice — would be heard.  Here’s what she would say, over top of the images of murder victims in Quebec and Nova Scotia.

“This is the Ruger Mini assault rifle.

It was used to murder 14 women in Montréal.

It was used to murder 22 people in Nova Scotia. 36 Canadians.

Justin Trudeau wants to ban it.

Erin O’Toole wants to keep it around.

On Sept. 20, remember those 36 Canadians.  Be their voice.

On Sept. 20, vote Liberal.”

That’s the ad, more or less.  I’m confident something very much like it is about to show up on every TV screen, and every computer screen, many times between now and voting day.  That’s a fact.

And here’s another fact: I had written a not-bad column for this newspaper saying that I thought Justin Trudeau was done like dinner.  That — over everyone’s expectations, mine included — it looked like Erin O’Toole was going to eke out a win.

And then — boom! — the gun issue came back.

Incredibly, improbably, the Conservative campaign had again decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  I asked my editors to hold the column because I no longer thought it was true.

Here’s the problem, O’Toole folks: you can’t wiggle your way out of this one, as your leader tried to do at the end of the French debate.  You can’t say you misspoke, or say you were misquoted.  You can’t spin it.

Here’s why.

It’s right in your damn platform, boys and girls.  It’s right there, in black and white:

“We will start by repealing C-71 and the May 2020 Order in Council.” The “May 2020 Order in Council” statement sounds innocuous enough — but that’s the cabinet decision that was passed to ban the Ruger Mini that was used in the mass murders in Montreal in 1989 and Nova Scotia in 2020.

How do you walk that back, when it’s right in your party platform?  Take it from a guy who still hears about the “replace the GST” promise in the 1993 Liberal Red Book: big political graves are dug with little shovels.  That’s the political reality.

This, too, is political reality: politics is all about symbols.  Not words, not policies: symbols.  And the Ruger Mini is a symbol — to most Canadians (because only about 5,000 Canadians actually own one), the Ruger Mini is not even a gun anymore.  It’s part of our history.  It’s a serpent, spitting death.

Another reality: the gun nuts will tweet their usual ungrammatical, misspelled crap about gangs and farmers and freedom and whatnot.  But the gun nuts don’t win national political campaigns, do they? They lose them.  They’re really, really good at it.

I’m a gun owner.  I’m a gun owner who believes, deeply, that Justin Trudeau is the worst Prime Minister we’ve had in generations.  I believe he must, must be defeated.

But thanks to a few short words in the Conservative platform, I’m no longer sure he will be.

Bang bang.

— Kinsella was former prime minister Jean Chretien’s special assistant

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Erin O’Toole won by not losing.

Justin Trudeau won by sounding authentic, for once.

Yves-Francois Blanchet won by being himself.

Jagmeet Singh lost — by looking lost.

That’s this writer’s assessment of the first federal leaders debate, held Thursday night in Montreal. It was entirely in French, and fast-paced. But it made for compelling viewing.

The debate was organized by Quebec’s TVA network, and the moderation — by veteran broadcaster Pierre Bruneau — was simply excellent. Unlike what we are all likely to see in the English-language debate, the TVA show was well-done: Lots of important subjects covered, and very little over-talk.

The leaders, meanwhile, mostly performed well. When he speaks in English, Liberal Leader Trudeau is too often affected and phony. But in the French debate, Trudeau didn’t look or sound like he was acting. On subjects like vaccines and guns, he was passionate.

The Bloc’s Blanchet is an award-winning figure in Quebec’s entertainment and communications industry, and it showed. He has a broadcaster’s voice, and a performer’s style, and he clearly knows how to use the camera to his advantage.

The New Democrats’ Singh desperately needs Quebec voters to embrace the NDP, as they did overwhelmingly a decade ago under Jack Layton. But, based on Singh’s first 2021 debate performance, that’s unlikely to happen. The Dipper boss was low-energy for much of the debate, and really didn’t ever score any points.

O’Toole, however, did — and not just by showing up. The Tory leader’s French was much better than many Quebec commentators expected. And he clearly surprised the other political leaders, too.

The expectations for O’Toole were as low as they can get — just as they were before this unnecessary, unwanted election kicked off. But he didn’t merely play defence in the debate. O’Toole was aggressive, at times, going after Trudeau on the appalling Liberal record on sexual harassment and treatment of women.

Trudeau was left blinking and sputtering throughout much of what the moderator Bruneau noted was the “MeToo” segment of the debate — because O’Toole put Trudeau on the ropes, and kept him there.

All of the opposition leaders hammered Trudeau on the election call itself, too. As in the rest of Canada, Quebec voters are mystified — and angry — that Trudeau called an election during a fourth wave in the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

As has been the case so far in the 36-day election, Trudeau was simply unable to come up with a compelling narrative for triggering an election two years earlier than he needed to.

But the debate wasn’t all bad for the Liberal leader. Watching him, no one should be surprised to see Trudeau continuing to hammer away at the vaccination issue in the remainder of the campaign: On Thursday night, he was effective on it.

Trudeau clearly feels O’Toole — who has an undisclosed number of unvaccinated Tory candidates, and has been blasé about it — is vulnerable on vaccines. If Trudeau goes neg in the remaining days, it’ll likely be on the hot topic that is vaccines.

For those who are dismissive about the French-language debates, keep this in mind: In 2019, Blanchet became far more popular after turning in strong French-language performances. And the resulting Bloc surge helped to rob Trudeau of his majority government.

Remember this, too: O’Toole needed to show that he could be prime minister for all of Canada, not just Western Canada.

Based on his first debate performance as Conservative leader, he did that and then some.

And that’s why he, more than Messrs. Trudeau or Singh, was the winner.

— Warren Kinsella has provided TV debate coaching to Canadian political party leaders since 1989

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Sexual assault.

Because that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Whether the Prime Minister of Canada — and several members of his party — sexually assaulted women.

It’s an important question, and not just because there’s an election going on. It’s important all the time, because it happens all the time, at every level of society. Sexual harassment and sexual misconduct, too.

The Criminal Code of Canada says “sexual assault” happens if a person is touched in any way that interferes with their sexual integrity. It includes kissing, touching, intercourse and any other sexual activity without his or her consent. It’s a crime to do those things.

The definition of sexual assault was on my mind the evening of June 6, 2018. Someone — a female Member of Parliament — had sent me a message.

“Hi Warren,” it read. “Do you know about this B.C. community paper editorial about Trudeau being handsy with a reporter before he was in politics?”

I said I didn’t.

The anonymous correspondent sent me the August 2000 editorial from the Creston Valley Advance. It described an encounter between the author of the editorial — who I have never named, and I never will — and Justin Trudeau at a beer festival.

The paper stated, as fact, that Trudeau had groped the female reporter. And then how, after learning that she also wrote for a newspaper in the Postmedia chain, apologized for touching her.

“I’m sorry,” the newspaper quoted Trudeau as saying, after the incident. “If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward.”

The editorial went on from there, criticizing the future prime minister for “groping a young woman” he didn’t know.

I checked the British Columbia archives. The editorial wasn’t fake news. It was real. I checked up on the reporter: She had indeed worked at the Creston Valley Advance.

What the editorial described, on the face of it, was sexual assault. Groping someone without their consent is sexual assault, full stop.

I decided the best thing to do was to place the editorial on my website, with no commentary, and no identification of the victim. Within hours, the story ricocheted around the world, covered by everyone from CNN to the New York Times.

What was Justin Trudeau’s response to the story? Well, he blamed the victim, basically. Said he didn’t know what she was thinking.

And then he went jogging. Shirtless.

That, to me, was so lacking in self-awareness — so lacking in respect for what that woman had experienced, frankly — it made me want to throw up.

Because, you know, zero tolerance.

That’s what Trudeau has said, many times. That he and his party have “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.

In 2018, he gave interviews to Canadian Press and CBC about the subject. Here’s what he said.

“We have no tolerance for this — we will not brush things under the rug, but we will take action on it immediately,” he declared.

He said the same sort of thing to CBC Radio. There, the self-proclaimed Feminist Prime Minister proclaimed: “I’ve been very, very careful all my life to be thoughtful, to be respectful of people’s space and people’s headspace as well.”

No, he hasn’t. No, he isn’t.

And we have been provided with yet another goddamned example of that, just this week, mid-election. When we learned that a member of his Liberal caucus has been the subject of multiple complaints of sexual misconduct and worse. One of the complainants actually attempted suicide.

Trudeau’s response? He says he believes the MP. And we simply don’t know if he or his PMO consulted with the RCMP. We need to know that. We deserve to know that.

So, it’s relevant that, early Wednesday, Trudeau’s former attorney general — Canada’s lawyer, in effect — wrote this online about the latest allegations: “Anyone who has a responsibility to address (the Liberal sexual misconduct allegations) and does not is not fit to lead. Anyone who stands by and does nothing is complicit. Anyone who is surprised has not been paying attention.”

Well said, Jody Wilson-Raybould.

Is it sexual assault? Is it sexual harassment? Those are, and will remain, important questions.

But here’s another one: After all that we now know, why the hell would anyone vote for this creep?

— Warren Kinsella is the founder of the Daisy Group, a firm that has worked with multiple women who have experienced sexual harassment in Trudeau’s Liberal Party

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