Campaign Event Recap

As I mentioned yesterday, Neil and I were planning on attending a Liberal campaign rally yesterday evening. The event's headliner was to be Michael Ignatieff.

Almost as soon as we arrived at the hotel hosting the event it was clear that quite a number of people would be attending this rally. Many of these people were decked out in red clothing of various sorts. The other thing that almost immediately became clear was that this was an older crowd, those of us below 40 were in a definite minority.

That being said, there was definitely a crowd. Once the initial space was filled they even had to make available an overflow section of the room, which also seemed to fill up nicely.

After what seemed like something of a delay, though as I didn't have a watch and there was some confusion about the planned starting time I don't really know how delayed the start was, Mike Savage came on stage to get things going.

Much to my surprise, Savage then introduced all of the Liberal candidates for the province. Each of the candidates then came on stage with a spouse or family member. As this process was taking placed noticed that a friend's wife heading on stage as her candidate father's requisite family member. These individuals then positioned themselves across the back of the stage creating something of a human backdrop.

The final candidate to be introduced was Stan Kutcher, the candidate for the Halifax riding. Kutcher was then given the opportunity to introduce Michael Ignatieff.

You can check out a video of this (and some of Ignatieff's speech if you would like.



[Embedded video]

Much to my surprise, Ignatieff seemed to be a pretty confident speaker. He seemed to have no problem speaking in the rally setting. He even got one pretty good laugh with a line suggesting that if Harper promised to stop telling lies about the Liberals he would stop telling the truth about the Conservatives.

Maybe not surprisingly, the rally basically just consisted of the introductions by Savage and Kutcher and then the speech by Ignatieff. There were not opportunities for questions and as far as I could tell there wasn't even an organized meet and greet after the conclusion of the main event.

As far as I was concerned the biggest frustration of the event was the post-rally emptying of the room. It seemed to take about 15 or 20 minutes for us to be able to finally make our way out of the room where the lobby was held. As we were leaving I couldn't entirely figure out the reason for the bottle neck, though it could have had to do with people just socializing as they exited the room.

Anyway, I guess I will now have to see if I can find a way to attend one or two more of these held by other parties. I am curious to see how they stack up against the Ignatieff version.