Ontario Debate Recap: Not As Bad As Expected

Del Duca Won, Horwath Sucked

Well, that was less of a waste of time than I expected it to be, actually.

There’s always two parts of debate performances: who won the debate, and who will be seen to win the debate when the polls come in this week. It’s two different questions, because the winner of the debate in a technical debating sense will not always win the polls afterwards. That said, I think Del Duca had the best outcome of the night, mostly because Ford got hit all night and Horwath shit the bed.

We’ll start with the erstwhile leader of the Ontario opposition, who spent her night interrupting Del Duca, and not really saying anything when she did. The problem with Horwath is that she said a lot of things that are good, in a sense – she spoke in platitudinal nonsense, not plans or specifics, and if this is her last debate (please God, let it be so), then she has left on a dour night. Good riddance to a failed politician.

Ford’s performance was weird – he was deeply insistent on defending against the Liberals and basically ignoring the NDP, which is both the correct tactical decision and also a bit of a signal that he’s not as confident in his position as the leaked internal Kouvalis polling suggested he was.

Ford’s entire strategy – to turn the debate back to the choices of Kathleen Wynne – was both smart, in a sense, but also a little bit odd, because Ford wasn’t really willing to make a positive case for the province. He touted all the things he was doing to make it great, yes, but he was also suggesting that the province was a mere shithole four years ago – which, despite what people thought of Wynne, just wasn’t true.

Del Duca was good – I vascillate on how good he was as opposed to just being the guy on stage when the other two main leaders were shit, but he was the clear and obvious winner of the night. He came into the night with a “aw schucks, folks” kinda message to spin and he spun it well. He used his time to put popular policies into the window, and his repeated line that they needed to be talking about the new challenges of 2022 and not relitigating the 2018 election again was good, in my view.

Is the debate a game changer? No, but that’s not a bad thing. Ford isn’t going to get a poll bump out of this, and given he’s at 35% in Abacus and 35.5% in Mainstreet coming into the debate, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. What tonight was was a chance for Horwath to get back into the “Progressive Primary”, and she blew it, so the NDP campaign, such as it even exists right now, is basically as dead as Lewis Hamilton’s chances of becoming Mercedes’ #1 driver again (or, for the non-F1 fan, as dead as my chances of marrying a woman).

That said, my true favourite from the night wasn’t Del Duca. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Greens leader, not out of malice, but out of indifference. I realized today, actually, I didn’t even really know what he looked like before today – or, at least, I didn’t remember. But my God, what a tour de force from Mike Schreiner tonight.

As the leader of the Greens, Schreiner understands he won’t be Premier of the province, but he knows that he can hurt Doug Ford, and he took a baseball bat to Ford at every opportunity. When he had a chance to attack the Liberals for their past education record, he made the attack – but soft pedaled it, allowing Del Duca to politely respond.

Mike Schreiner understood the assignment tonight, and for that, my first drink tonight was dedicated to you, Mike. Cheers, mate.

Also, before anyone panics – Mainstreet’s tracker will take a few days to cycle out pre-debate samples. That’s how a tracking poll works. Do not overreact to the next couple of days worth of results and ascribe them to the debate. Do not do this.