This marks the second provincial election campaign in which TVA has decided to separate itself from the consortium that organizes televised leaders’ debates and go it alone with a series of one-on-one debates.
It almost didn’t happen. Pauline Marois and the Parti Québécois said no at first, wanting to limit her to the other, more traditional debate that aired on Radio-Canada and Télé-Québec. But she later relented.
You might recall that the Sun News Network, which like TVA is owned by Quebecor Media, also aired the TVA face-à-face debates in 2012. Few people watched it on Sun News, but when a report about the debate that included two short clips were posted to Sun News’s website, it went a bit viral. The clips came to a total of about 23 seconds, and they were highlights picked by Sun News, so they didn’t show the worst parts.
Since the translated debates weren’t posted online, they might have been lost to history if not for one thing: I recorded all three hour-long debates on my PVR. And they’ve been sitting there ever since.
With the 2014 face-à-face debates only hours away, I recorded some clips from the debate and compiled them into eight minutes of highlights. The result is the video you see above.
A source at Sun News tells me that the network will air tonight’s debate, but that they have hired different translators.
I’ll be PVRing it anyway. Just in case.
TVA’s face-à-face debates air Thursday, March 27 from 8pm to 10pm on TVA and simultaneously translated on Sun News Network. It will also air on CPAC.
UPDATE: After posting the video to YouTube, I went in to clean the automatically-generated captions. But the captions generated for the debate clips were just so great that I couldn’t touch them. They include such gems as:
- 2:06: “I wouldn’t victims contra months prego merman”
- 5:28: “second spend your life getting minutes for me his / as Julia and modern yesterday sent / week with the mall butthead”
- 6:14: “he added that the troops mister sister 20 as you go”
- 6:34: “thank you so much as a queen of thank you so much musica”
- 7:21: “and mister across america their leader / how to Chris you’re a doctor becker / he wouldn’t allow your the day all the balls we have”
- 8:08: “going to help me fire a gritty / you lose my me I cannot do we”
- 8:37: “your house layout so attacker 7,000 jobs that are you gonna cut people”
- 8:49: “overheard the Cougar 30 Passa Passa”
- 8:53: “I hope this exchange farewell lighting you for your torso”