Much of my evaluations of the French debate hold true here as well. Surprise, surprise; these are the same men. Duceppe "won" this debate too. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem hard for him to do so. Well, his burden is lower: he never intends to form a government...in Canada. His (too long, interrupted) opening speech was an interesting approach too, and I'd have liked to have given him longer. It seems as though he (perhaps partly correctly?) identifies RoC angst over Québec nationhood as a fear that Québec is claiming that it is Too Good for grungy anglo Canada.

Aside from a couple of token disagreements over the Clarity Act (claiming that the NDP is inconsistent) and a couple of other things , Duceppe essentially ran an agreement-fest with Layton, confirming my original opinion that if you take away the national question, the Bloc is almost like an NDP Québec wing, notwithstanding that the NDP has its own token wing. Indeed, lots of NDP supporters, myself included, wish that we could vote for Duceppe; but sadly he is a Québec sovereigntist.

Speaking of Jack Layton, he still looked a little stoned. I can see how some people might have found him too shrill this time around, especially with Martin's wounded-gentleman act. Nevertheless, both he and Harper had some effective attacks on Martin, and Martin sometimes fought back fairly well. Otherwise, it was as Tilting at Windmills describes it...

No clear winner again, except maybe Duceppe. This debate probably has some impact on the NDP, but I'm not so sure about Harper and Martin. We'll see.

But I find that most of this election debate analysis to be politically rather vacuous. There's very little scope to discuss real issues here. It's great for the media, but I don't know how great it is for democracy.