FIRST READING: The weird minutia you missed from the French leaders' debate

In the wake of Wednesday’s French leaders’ debate, press accounts have covered most of the main beats, such as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre asking Liberal Leader Mark Carney if he was “embarrassed” to request a fourth term, and Carney defending the Liberal record by saying, “I just got here.” But there’s a whole bunch of weird minutiae you missed if you were just paying attention to the important parts. Some of those details are below. The pronunciation of Carney’s name changes in French French speakers generally have a slightly different twist on Carney’s last name. The emphasis is on the “ney” instead of the “car,” and there’s a raising to the word almost as if it’s appended with a question mark. On Wednesday night even the two Anglophones on stage insisted on a French-accented pronunciation of “Carney.” All the while, the debate was one of the few extended TV appearances by Poilievre in which the host didn’t struggle with his name. Anglophone mispronunciations of the Tory leader’s name range everywhere from Paul-eev to Pol-e-veer to Pwol-i-ev. Carney’s French isn’t just bad, it’s weird As Canadian prime ministers go, Carney speaks the most rudimentary French of anyone since John Turner. But amid his halting cadences and long pauses, Carney will occasionally throw out words that are rarely spoken among Canadian politicians such as “paperasse,” a European term for red tape, or “catalyser,” the French verb for catalyze. This could be a relic of the fact that most of the French spoken by Carney over the past 10 years might have been at Geneva-based banking summits rather than, say, Trois Rivières Legion halls. Poilievre attempted two jokes Quebec politics generally feature far more jokes, quips and clever insults than in the rest of Canada. But given that most of the candidates were already working in their second language, they generally didn’t risk any attempts at humour. Two rare exceptions came from Poilievre, although neither was a huge laugh line. During a discussion about a proposed tramway for Quebec City, Poilievre said that a Conservative government would ensure it was painted blue. And when the party leaders were asked which American products they were personally boycotting, Poilievre said, “This is a delicious conversation.” On the question of which U.S. products the leaders were avoiding, both Blanchet and Singh cited “ strawberries .” The U.S. is indeed a major supplier of strawberries to Canada, but the line was likely a dig at Carney. In a Radio-Canada interview earlier this month, Carney was asked directly whether he was still eating American strawberries, to which he responded that he’s the prime minister, doesn’t do his own shopping, and had no idea. On Wednesday night he had a better response, saying he’d stopped drinking American wine. The post-debate questions were dominated by right-wing media The respective campaigns, including the Conservatives, generally try and avoid right-wing independent media such as Juno News or The Rebel – and will screen access to their press events accordingly. But the post-debate press conferences were managed by the Leaders’ Debates Commission, who let in basically anyone who applied (and they’ve been sued in the past for doing differently ). The result was a wall of right-wing media unlike anything that has ever really existed at an all-party campaign event. The questions that got the most attention were True North’s Alex Zoltan asking Carney how many genders there were, to which the Liberal leader responded, “Uh, in terms of sex, there are two.” And also Singh refusing to respond to a Rebel News question about church arson, saying he doesn’t talk to organizations that traffic in “misinformation and disinformation.” Poilievre’s “not true” mantra This was something that last came up during the Conservative leadership debates in 2022. Whenever a rival started attacking Poilievre, Poilievre would respond with a calm, steady mantra of “not true, not true, not true” until they were done speaking. He unveiled the tactic a few times on Wednesday, mostly in response to Singh. At one point as Singh accused Poilievre of intending to slash public services, he had to contend with a drone of, “C’est pas vrai, c’est pas vrai, c’est fausse.” Someone kept loudly ripping paper At several points during the broadcast, a distinctive sound of tearing paper can be heard. No paper tearing ever appears on camera. The Bloc Québécois leader once again insisted on a bizarre gunslinger stance Official photos of the four candidates show Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet adopting a strangely aggressive “power” pose; shoulders back, chin up, legs splayed at a 45-degree angle. He’s obviously doing this intentionally, since it’s the exact pose he adopted for the leaders’ debates in the 2021 federal election. And it’s a pose he kept up throughout the entire debate, including the unusually wide stance. Blanchet claimed the Americans would never hurt their own economy This was during a discussion in which Poilievre was arguing that if Canada didn’t build a pipeline through Quebec, the province would remain dependent on fuel brought in via the U.S., thus giving leverage to U.S. President Donald Trump. To this, Blanchet replied that “the Americans would never hurt their own economy” — the intention apparently being to say that the United States would never cut off Quebec from oil access, as this would be unprofitable to them. Unfortunately for Blanchet, he was making this case within days of the Trump administration effectively deleting $9 trillion from the U.S. stock market in the service of unilaterally declaring a trade war against the entire planet .

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