I attended the first hour of an all-candidates forum and debate for my riding of Kitchener–Waterloo, one of four ridings in the Region of Waterloo. It was held at RIM Park, a city park with many sports fields, walking trails, and a large building with several gymnasiums and meeting rooms. The room for the forum was woefully undersized, maybe seating 200 of the 400 people there, so many people were standing crammed at the back, including me and companions – I think they should have held it in one of the gymnasiums.

The CAP candidate, a university student, was well-spoken and complimentary to most of the other candidates, but his main plan (for the government to loan itself money at a sub-market interest rate instead of borrowing from mostly foreign companies on the open market, thereby allowing personal income taxes to be eliminated) struck me as a modern version of the old Social Credit print-worthless-money scheme. I got the impression he was there to raise some ideas and wasn’t fooling himself that he had any hope of winning.

The Communist candidate had trouble expressing himself well in English, or at least my companions and I had trouble understanding him, but he got across his main ideas that free trade is bad and “we need jobs, we need food”.

Telegdi (the Liberal incumbent), Braid (the Conservative) and MacLellan (the Green), expressed their own positions and party positions well. Telegdi misspoke in his closing statements, saying that something he and the Green had in common was the goal of “getting Stephen Harper elected prime minister”. Obviously he either meant to say Stephane Dion or else stopping Harper from being prime minister. It was funny, but caused a disproportionately intense reaction among the crowd. The other candidates ignored it, except for Braid, who said, at the start of his closing statements, that he was glad to see he picked up a new vote.

I wasn’t impressed with the NDP candidate, Jacobsen. During his opening statement, the Conservative candidate mentioned his wife and daughters and also Harper. I was worried that he would continue mentioning his family as a selling point throughout the debate and also make the case that we should vote for him because Harper is so great. Instead, he didn’t mention his family again and didn’t excessively mention Harper, but Jacobsen referred to herself as a “pastor and a counsellor [and a mother]” in every answer, and played up how great Jack Layton is. After a few times, my companions and I would repeat the mantra “pastor and counsellor” under our breath when she said it and ask each other “What is her job? Did she say? Is she a mother?” Her tone seemed overly calm and too soothing – very pastory. One of my companions called it patronizing, as if we were her Sunday schoolers.

Many of these observations are superficial, but they are my impressions of the forum.

I don’t expect this riding to change hands this election. As someone said on the Election Prediction Project:

This is not a Liberal riding, it’s Andrew Talegdi’s riding. It is one of the few ridings in Ontario where people vote for the person not the party. Mr. Talegdi and Ms Witmer [the PC MPP] are both good people, one’s a Conservative, the other a Liberal.