There may not have been a super obvious winner — though five of the leaders had their moments — but there sure was a single clear loser.

That would be the current prime minister.

It was Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s turn — the format of the leaders debate was bizarre and complex, at least to my tiny mind — to ask any of the other leaders a single question, whereupon the recipient of the question got a minute to answer and then in turn, chosen randomly, the others yelled over one another.

Scheer immediately turned to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.

Scheer pointed out that he’d broken ethics rules twice, interfered with an ongoing criminal investigation (SNC-Lavalin and the full-court press Trudeau, a few of his key henchmen and staffers in the PCO and PMO, put on former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould) and asked, “When did you decide the rules don’t apply to you?”

Trudeau first had the gall to repeat his mantra from the height of the SNC imbroglio: “The role of the PM is to stand up for Canadian jobs.”

Scheer snapped, reminded him “you said the allegations in the Globe and Mail were false,” and Trudeau seriously responded, “They were false.”

No, sir, they weren’t.

Your own ethics commissioner said they were true. The evidence of several of those who testified at the Commons Justice Committee bolstered that this was in fact precisely what had happened to JWR.

So if there was a knockout punch Monday night, that was it, delivered by Trudeau unto Trudeau, always delicious to see.

He has learned nothing. He still believes he was right, and that, as Scheer said, the rules about prosecutorial independence and lobbying an AG, like so many other rules, don’t apply to him.

Trudeau looked grey, uncomfortable and sweaty from the outset, perhaps because he knew that without his script and a teleprompter, he’d be reaching into his bag of nose-stretchers and would stand revealed, as Scheer put it once during a question about defending Canadian interests and values on the world stage and mentioned Trudeau’s ghastly penchant for dress-up and blackface, and said in effect, no wonder he doesn’t remember how many times he put on blackface “because he’s always wearing a mask. You’re a phoney and a fraud and you don’t deserve to govern this country.”

It was a spectacularly Canadian debate, which is to say there was very little actual debating between leaders, because the five-member team of moderators kept telling the politicians they were out of time.

Despite the irritating format, the moderators did a fine job, within the confines of a four-minute open debate between pairings of leaders, a one-minute debate, various other exchanges under the themes of the night.

And easily the most personable figures (though surely we ought to be wary of seemingly charming people by now) were Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet and Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats — in other words, two leaders unlikely to form government on Oct. 22 and a man leading a party that wants to take Quebec out of Confederation.

May showed a solid grasp of every issue, I thought, though she said “I am appalled” too often; Blanchet was funny, which is hard to do in one’s second language, but it was Singh who was the most humane and came as close to stealing the show as was possible given the format.

And he was funny, too.

It was a spectacularly Canadian debate, which is to say there was very little actual debating

 

The third time one of the other leaders called him Mr. Scheer by mistake (Trudeau did it twice), he pointed to his bright yellow turban and shrugged as if to say, “What more can I do?” He was so genuinely amiable he was hard not to like.

But, as is so common with the NDP, he took it a step too far when in the midst of a yell-off about abortion, he said, “A man has no position in a discussion on a woman’s right to choose.”

He was greeted with wild applause from the studio audience (a breaking of the rule — this thing had a lot of rules — they were to hold their cheers), but it’s an extreme and awful thing to say, in my books.

Men ought not to get the determining vote in that discussion, but surely to God they ought to have a voice, both in personal relationships and in broader public discussions.

And that was it — a non-debate debate, where the only time the audience cheered was about an issue (abortion) that is settled and has been unmessed-with by all governments for decades and which all leaders have pledged to leave unmessed-with.

I missed a Leaf game for this?

They, like Justin Trudeau, lost.

• Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki