Singh, gold. Scheer, silver. May, bronze. Mr. Grecian Formula: did not qualify.

— 10.08.2019 07:41 AM

I was on Newstalk 1010 late last night for the debate. Here’s some of the commentary as it happened. And, below, are some of my tweets, gratis!


Comments (44)

My latest: debate? What debate?

— 10.07.2019 12:33 PM

Here’s the thing about Monday’s leader’s debate, Canada.

You won’t be watching it.

Well, let’s amend that. Sun readers are a scrappy, elbows-up lot, who dig politics and a good scrap. Sun readers are likelier to be watching the debate. They like debates.

But most everyone else? They won’t be.

Everyone else will be watching Shark Tank (which this election kind of is) or Wheel of Fortune (which this election isn’t). Or, they’ll be binge-watching old episodes of Arrested Development (which neatly describes most of our federal political leaders).

Increasingly, voters simply don’t watch leader’s debates in Canada. For example, Maclean’s magazine put together a debate in 2015, but it had fewer than 40% of the viewers who took in the 2011 English-language debate. And Maclean’s actually counted people who only watched part of that debate, not all of it.

Master Chef got way more viewers.

Last time around, there was a Globe and Mail debate, too, and it was absolutely awful to watch. YouTube later found only about 400,000 Canadians did so. That’s in a country, in 2015, with 36 million people in it. Ipsos later did a poll and found only about 20% of Canadians watched the first couple debates in 2015.

There’s been one debate in 2019 that Justin Trudeau has deigned to attend. It was entirely in French.

Around 1.2 million Quebecers allegedly took in the TVA leader’s debate, in which Andrew Scheer, Jagmeet Singh and the separatist leader, Yves-Francois Blanchet, also participated. In a province with more than six million eligible voters, 1.2 million viewers isn’t anything to brag about, although TVA did.

Oh, and in English Canada — in English — nobody got to watch the French debate when it was happening. Because it was entirely in French. To get a sense of what happened, the vast majority of Canadians needed to check out the media after the fact (Widely-held consensus: the separatist guy won, hands down).

As someone who owns a public opinion firm — Daisy Data, at your service! — I can relate one empirical statistical fact: a dwindling number of voters watch debates from gavel to gavel. They may in take part of a debate, sure. But not all of it.

What voters do, instead, is watch the news media’s coverage of a debate. They’ll see a clip of a fiery exchange on TV, or they’ll hear a so-called defining moment on the radio heading into work, or they’ll read expert commentary in the pages of the Sun and hopefully nowhere else.

But they don’t watch all of the debate.

I’ve prepared prime ministers and premiers for debates, and I now know I did it all wrong. I assumed, as did my debate-prep colleagues, that everyone else watched the debates as closely as we did. That was a flawed assumption.

It also explains how Justin Trudeau was seen as a winner in the 2015 debates, even against two superior debaters — Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair. Trudeau’s strategy in 2015 was a lot like what he did in his celebrated boxing match with Patrick Brazeau: he waited in his corner for an opening, then he’d go in with a flurry of punches.

He didn’t try to dominate all of the matches — he just did what he needed to do to get clipped on TV, then he’d sprinkle the results all over social media.

It worked, because he knew that Canadians were more likely to see clips of a debate than all of a debate.

That’s what he’s going to do on Monday night, too. In an era of shrinking debate audiences, it works. Will the other leaders let him get away with it in 2019 like they did in 2015? Tune in and see.

Or, join everyone else, and go watch Shark Tank.

— Sun columnist Warren Kinsella will be providing debate commentary on Bell Media radio on Monday night


Comments (25)

Did Justin Trudeau call Jagmeet Singh “Marge Simpson”?

— 10.07.2019 12:07 PM

This has been circulating on the Internet since last night. It’s a recording – made with what sounds very much like a member of the Liberal caucus – in which it’s alleged that the Prime Minister made racist remarks about the NDP leader. More than once.

Given that Trudeau thinks it’s okay to have Liberal candidates making racist remarks – given his own racist conduct – we all know he thinks this kind of bullshit is okay.

It isn’t. And it’s up to all of us to say so.


Comments (11)

Why did Justin Trudeau abruptly leave that school mid-term?

— 10.07.2019 11:21 AM

The question isn’t going away.

Trudeau’s story has changed at least four times since 2001

After media reports revealed that Justin Trudeau wore blackface during an event at West Point Grey Academy, Canadians have been asking why exactly Justin Trudeau left his teaching job at the school. It’s understandable why people have questions, after all Trudeau’s story has changed four times since 2001.

First, the Ottawa Citizen reported in 2001 that Trudeau would “give up his teaching job at a Vancouver private school next September to give speeches.” Several days later this claim was refuted by Trudeau in a statement issued by law firm Heenan Blaikie. The Montreal Gazette reported Trudeau was accepting a teaching job at a public school.

In his 2014 autobiography, Trudeau says he left the school after a dispute with the administration over an article written in the school newspaper. According to Trudeau, he convinced a student to write an article criticizing the fact that the girls at the school were never reprimanded for the way they dress. This article was deemed disrespectful by the school’s administration.

The Vancouver Sun reported in 2015 that the reason Trudeau left the school was “in part over a dispute over dress code and values.”

In a 2019 book by John Ivison, Trudeau’s departure is summed up as “a disagreement over an article written by a student for which Trudeau was responsible”.

On October 4, 2019 Trudeau said he left the school “because [he] was moving on with [his] life”.

That same day, the former headmaster of the school said that Trudeau left the school because he was going to study to be an engineer.

Why did Justin Trudeau leave West Point Grey Academy? What’s the real reason? Why has his story changed so many times, and if the above reports are incorrect, why hasn’t Trudeau corrected the record?

Trudeau will have the opportunity tonight to tell Canadians the truth.


Comments (43)

Sigh

— 10.06.2019 07:07 PM

No Globe story coming, notwithstanding the grilling their reporter gave Trudeau on Friday afternoon about his past.


Comments (50)

My latest: why isn’t Andrew Scheer way ahead?

— 10.04.2019 09:48 AM

So, Andrew.

You don’t mind if I call you Andrew, do you? It’s better than what I sometimes used to call you, which was Blandy Andy.

I stopped calling you that because you figured out a way to make the bland thing work, like Brampton Bill Davis did. You embraced your inner ordinariness.

You starting hanging out in hockey rinks and you commenced rubbing Timbits all over your torso – which, unlike Prime Minister Blackface, you have never exposed to a grateful nation. You became the Canadian Everyman, and you made it work for you.

The pocketbook stuff, too. That was good, too. You and Hamish concluded, rightly, that voters regard everyone in politics as an unindicted co-conspirators, so you stopped hollering all the time that Justin is a crook. You just kept talking about how hard it is for regular folks to get by, and left the scandalmongering to the media. That was smart.

And the polls bore fruit, sort of. Ipsos says you’re ahead, and you have been for the entirety of the campaign. Nanos says you’re tied with Trudeau for best choice for Prime Minister, which is way better than you’ve been in the past.

But. But, Andrew, seriously?

Why haven’t 110 per cent of respondents declared you their favoured choice for Prime Minister? Why isn’t your party a kabillion points ahead of the Liberals? Why, Andrew, why?

Because that’s the question everyone is asking themselves, Andrew. Hell, that’s the question members of the Liberal caucus are asking themselves – many of whom had purchased political funeral insurance, and now they’re wondering if they can convert it to another kind of policy at the insurance brokerage where you used to fetch coffee and answer the phone.

By any reasonable standard, Andrew, Justin Trudeau leads the most corrupt – the most casually evil – government in Canadian history. It is shiftless; it is reckless; it is soulless. It is a mess.

And they could still win, Andrew. They could still beat you. How can this be?

A scan of Trudeau’s press clippings reads like a grand jury indictment.

• In LavScam, he obstructed justice when he tried, repeatedly, to stop the criminal corruption trial of a Québec-based donor to his party.
• He violated conflict of interest laws when he accepted freebies during a junket to the Aga Khan’s private island.
• He lied about electoral reform, and balancing the budget, and improving relations with the provinces and the world.
• He made us an international laughingstock with his Griswolds Vacation India trip, and enraged the world’s largest democracy – our ally and Commonwealth partner.
• And, most recently, he admitted he repeatedly mocked black people by wearing blackface and jumping around like an ape – and he admitted that there’s more of it out there in the ether, but he doesn’t know how much, because he was wasted a lot of the time.

After all that, Andrew – after all that scandal, more of which this newspaper has been investigating for weeks, stay tuned to this bat-channel, everyone – why aren’t you way ahead? Why aren’t you creaming Chewbacca Socks?

Why, to cite just two examples from the past 24 hours, did you attract fewer people at a Brampton rally than Justin Trudeau’s Portuguese Water Dog, Kenzie, gets during a stroll through the park?

Why can’t you put an end to the interminable questions about your CV, and simply joke that you’re so boring, you’re the only guy in Canada who brags about being an insurance broker?

None of it makes sense, Andrew. None of it. You should be playing Fortnite with Hamish about now, getting ready to move into wherever we put Prime Ministers these days.

Instead, you’re fighting to get a decent lead. Instead, your caucus are whispering about the next leader.

It’s crazy, Andrew. But one thing isn’t crazy at all:

You’ve got three weeks left to win this thing.

And if you don’t, you’ll forever be remembered as the guy who couldn’t beat Prime Minister Blackface.


Comments (63)

She should’ve called her book Anger Management

— 10.04.2019 07:13 AM

Sending staff out to walk her dog, or pick up her personal items at the pharmacy, mocking them, etc. Yep, she’s a big winner everyone should listen to. Right.

https://twitter.com/kinsellawarren/status/1180071175185207296?s=20

img src=”http://warrenkinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/img_5672.jpg” class=”size-full wp-image-32130″ width=”528″ height=”475″>


Comments (3)

That was then, this is now

— 10.03.2019 03:43 PM

So:


Therefore:



Comments (38)