There are two ways to watch a leadership debate. One is to listen to what they say. The other is to watch how they say it. By that measure, the clear winner of this week's leadership debate on foreign policy was Justin Trudeau.
In his last English-language debate, the Liberal Leader was hyperactive and overly aggressive. He sounded as if he had warmed up with three Red Bulls. I kept muttering "Down, boy" at the TV. But on Monday night he was in the zone – energetic and passionate, yet steady and controlled. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper was his usual stoic self. The NDP's Thomas Mulcair was flat.
Afterward, one observer nailed the difference between the two older men and the younger one. "Those two are turbots," he said. By which he meant dull and uninspiring, cool and remote. Mr. Trudeau is a much more zesty dish – engaged and hot. Once the competency test is out of the way, Justin (who really does want you to call him by his first name) simply has a more attractive personality than they do.
For a sizable number of voters, Mr. Trudeau's competency is still an issue. For many more, it is not. He knows his stuff well enough to hold his own in two hours of live performance under pressure. He's confident and self-assured. He hasn't made a major blunder. He looks as if he's having a good time up there. After 10 years of Mr. Harper's technocratic bloodlessness, Mr. Trudeau's sunny enthusiasm is a relief.
Justin leads with his heart. And the two most heartfelt moments of the evening belonged to him. On refugees, he made a compelling plea for compassion and generosity. When Mr. Mulcair made a slurring reference to his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the War Measures Act, he eloquently defended his father's record and then hit a personal note. "It's quite emotional for me right now to be able to talk about him because it was 15 years ago tonight that he passed away," he said. "I know that he wouldn't want us to be fighting the battles of the past. He'd want us squarely focused on the future." Of course it was rehearsed. It was also touching and authentic. You could feel the crowd tear up.
Much has been made of Mr. Trudeau's policies – especially those, such as deficit spending, that differentiate him from his rivals. But the personality gap is far more striking. The "big five" personality traits, as identified by psychologists, are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Mr. Harper scores particularly low on openness, extraversion and agreeableness, while Mr. Trudeau scores particularly high.
Between the politics of fear and the politics of hope, Mr. Trudeau definitely prefers hope. His dream is to bring us all together and help us get along. In a must-read piece on The Walrus website, editor Jonathan Kay writes that Mr. Trudeau is prone to "energizing slogans and bold statements of purpose." Things like that make Mr. Harper break out in hives.
This election will be fought on competing policies, visions and values, but it will also be fought on tone. And it's here that Mr. Trudeau has the edge. Even people who respect Mr. Harper's track record are fatigued by all that negativity.
As for Mr. Trudeau's vision of what Canada should be doing in the world, it's pretty easy to sum up. We should work harder at helping people get along. We should use diplomacy instead of planes and bombs. Most of all, we should be multilateral. He answered every question in Monday's debate with the phrase "multilateral partners." Like others nostalgic for our noble past, he invoked the magic word "peacekeeping," as if peacekeeping had any relevance in places, like Syria, where there's no peace to keep.
Generally, he echoed all those disaffected foreign-policy bureaucrats in Ottawa who have been leaking like sieves to the news media all week. Canada is losing its international reputation. We don't have the impact or the moral standing that we used to have. In other words, we should go back to being honest brokers – the way we were when his dad was in charge.