Eh, Canada: Joe Biden and Sarah Palin Win Canada Handily
The results from last week's party leaders' debates are in! Stephen Harper, Jack Layton, Stephane Dion, Elizabeth May and Gilles Duceppe faced off in two high-stakes rounds, one in French and one in English, and the winner was…
Fifty-eight per cent of [a recent poll's] respondents didn't watch either the French-language debate on Wednesday or the English version the following night. Viewership of the French debate, in particular, appeared to have been low, with only 12 per cent of respondents overall, and only 27 per cent in Quebec, tuning in.
Preliminary ratings suggest about three million people, or less than a tenth of the Canadian population, watched the English debates on Thursday. By comparison, the U.S. vice-presidential debate on the same night between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin was watched by nearly 70 million people, nearly a quarter of that country's population.
Of course, Palin and Biden did cram bilingual debates into a single showdown.
He spoke English and she spoke SixPackican.
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Such is the magic of the PVR — I watched one live, then watched the other later. Take that, pollsters!
Although I love our multi-party system, the second Canadian debate resembled little more than a pre-school shouting match. There was some kind of (and I hesitate to use this word) elegance to the two-person VP debate.
Arguable as to which was the bigger debacle.
Well, given the Canadian debate ends up being a bit of a wash, I'm not terribly surprised… as this year's debate demonstrated, it usually ends up being a pile-on as all the opposition parties attack the leader. Although, I gotta give the Green party credit, they certainly came out looking very effective and informed at their first debate
In constrast, the Biden-Palin debate had the potential for great hilarity… between Biden's foot-in-mouth disease and Palin's chronic you-betcha-I'm-ignorant-syndrome, it could've been an historical failboat. Pity it didn't turn out that way.
The Canadian debate was a joke. While Harper was explaining Canadian economic policy while the other leaders stratagy was to gang up on him.
Canada's debates are ineffective as they have too many members. Be glad American debates only have the top two candidates.
Not to be confused with the lower slavic SixPackiak.