Trainwrecki

A quick post-mortem on the Saskatchewan leaders' debate.

For Calvert and Wall, the debate seems to have gone pretty much exactly as planned. Calvert was on the attack for most of the debate, and succeeded in pointing a few of the tough questions that need to be asked about the Sask Party while emphasizing a commitment to sharing Saskatchewan's wealth - though a few of his good points seem to have been lost in the open-time shouting match. Meanwhile, Wall showed signs of being a star pupil at the Stephen Harper School of Content-Free Politics, scrupulously avoiding any meaningful answers when challenged by Calvert while generally sticking to the Sask Party's script.

Which isn't to say that one of the leaders didn't manage to make an impact. But it's probably not the one that the Libs' leader was aiming for.

After starting off by managing to avoid answering a softball first question, Karwacki mostly made his presence felt as an obstacle to any meaningful discussion - remarkably managing to outdistance the other two by far in his unwillingness to allow the others to speak in what was undoubtedly a poorly-designed format. And along the way, he also managed strategic errors such as giving the NDP the opportunity to speak up for its efforts in saving jobs in Prince Albert and Meadow Lake, and taking an inexplicable stance against rural highway improvement.

At this rate, if Karwacki's still around by the next election, the Saskatchewan Libs will be begging to be excluded from the leaders' debate.

For now, though, his main impact in the campaign seems to have been to add momentum to his party's slide in the polls. Which means that if an NDP/Lib swing really is the decisive factor in Saskatchewan politics at the moment, then the Sask Party figures to be celebrating far too soon.