Conventioneering: Day 2 (The Speeches)

There were a number of important ones today - I only remember two, one very good and the other very bad.

The bad: Andrea Horwath, leader of the Ontario NDP. Ontario has a provincial election scheduled this year, and so they have brought her to speak before the party faithful. She went on for about 10, 12 minutes, but in terms of effectiveness the speech was front-loaded - the only goal she managed to achieve was to inform non-Ontario NDP that Ontario has a provincial election scheduled this year. What followed was a positively anachronistic feminist speech celebrating the breakthroughs of women in Canadian politics, and insisting that she would challenge the "old boys club" in Parliament. It would have killed at a suffragette convention, but this is 2011, and the NDP convention to boot - the party has already had two female leaders, while Canada has had a female prime minister and dozens of prominent female politicians. This antique message was also poorly delivered, with the forced levity and cheer that comes from a mix of terror and loathing. Her big applause line was a penis joke.

The good: Stephen Lewis, former leader of the Ontario NDP. This guy had soooooooo much charisma. He opened with a joke comparing himself to Castro, and then proceeded to dominate our hearts much like Fidel. He also gave a feminist speech, but a timely one, about the prevalence of sexual violence (he said "rape" like a dozen times. It was a very rapey speech, disconcertingly so) throughout the world, commending the NDP for insisting that a quarter of Libya-related aid go towards victims of rape. Arguing that violence against women had reached devastating proportions world wide, he called this epidemic "femicide." I doubt that will catch on.

He also says he knows how to eliminate AIDS - a program called treatment-as-prevention, which demonstrated that if HIV carriers are given anti-retroviral drugs, their likelihood of spreading the disease drastically decreases (by 96%). So, there's also that. Between style and substance, his was an impossible act to follow - you'd need Obama-in-2008 levels of charisma and the cure for cancer. Good luck with that.