I just found the English voice over of the French debate on CBC Newsworld. I’m secretly hoping that the person doing Jack Layton’s voice is a woman. How did they find a translator with a voice as monotone as Stephen Harper’s?

So here is my transcription of the debate from the English translation from French:

WHY ARE WE AFRAID OF TWO-TIER HEALTH CARE?

Why is no one answering the question? And why are we comparing it to France? Apparently there is an asymmetric agreement on health care with Quebec. And Gilles Duceppe keeps bringing up the same points in French as he did in English – there are too many civil servants in Ottawa employed by the ministry of health and not enough doctors. We need to employ more doctors and nurses instead of civil servants [amen]. Mr Duceppe doesn’t know reality, according to Mr Martin. What, that we don’t have enough doctors? That’s pretty much on par with reality as far as I can see.
Are we admitting failure if we send people to other provinces for health care? Well yes we are, says Mr Layton. And Mr Martin has been attacking Mr Klein… Oops, Stephen Harper wasn’t listening and missed out. Gilles jumps right in and takes over, and oh, we are out of time. On to…

GUN CONTROL

Smuggling is important, says Mr Layton. Important to deal with anyway. We need to arm everyone at the boarder so we can shoot everyone who tries to come into the country.
The Bloc will make it harder to be a criminal and we want more RCMP in Quebec. Hang on, if you want to separate, shouldn’t you want more of your provincial police force (can’t remember what it’s called) and not the federal police force?
The Liberals will work with the Americans to stop smuggling. This from the man who urges “Mr Harper, the Americans are our neighbours, not our nation.” We need to find hope by incarcerating criminals.
Well, now finally everyone is jumping on our bandwagon of being tough on crime, says Mr Harper. He is right. The Conservatives have been saying this for ages and now the others are finally getting on board. Don’t be so smug. But I like the idea of specific juvenile crime programs. As long as they are good, that is.
Moderator: Mr Harper, why do we need a harder line on crime when crime has, in fact, decreased? She does have a point. Perhaps and even more interesting question to all of the leaders: Why are you only beginning to care about gun violence now, after Toronto, when BC (Vancouver-Surrey) has been having problems with guns for ages.

ASSISTED SUICIDE

What? I didn’t know this was even an issue! Apparently there is a big case in the Quebec courts right now.
Would you help someone to die?
What a question! How do you dance around that one? Mr Harper did a decent job by stating that his party wouldn’t bring such a bill to the table. Mr Martin said he couldn’t. Mr Duceppe is proud of his caucus member who brought a bill forward to this end, and would allow it to be a free vote in his party. Good for him. Mr Layton wants discussion, but let’s prevent pain and suffering (good luck) and talk with everyone first. Lets all sit down and talk together and love eachother and work it out.

MARIJUANA

Would you decriminalize?
Mr Duceppe, we need to be stronger on organised crime.
Mr Harper does not intend to decriminalize marijuana. The liberals are too liberal (extra points for the play on words). Handguns, drugs, cool handbags are all inter-related and evil.
Mr Layton says we need to help people with disabilities, Peter Julien (that’s my dad’s MP in New West) proposed a bill to that end. Memo to Jack Layton, we are on to drugs now, not the disabled. Please don’t try to tell me that the disabled are criminal at the moment?
Mr Martin says the problem is grow ops. We want to put everyone in jail, then we wouldn’t have a problem. And now I am going to talk about disabled people.
I see the tactic, we don’t like the question so we just change the subject. Too bad no one can interrupt in our new style of debates.

and now on to… IMMIGRATION

Do we care about immigrants?
Gilles Duceppe – “pick me, pick me, I do, I work with them even when it is not an election and when I can pretend that I am not an member of the Bloc, but then I’ll tell everyone on national TV that I do this so that it doesn’t really matter if I pretend not to be an MP.” Stephen Harper – we need to help people to use their skills in Canada. Apparently we have a force field in Canada that blocks all skills from use here. Oh, its just the government regulations. Jack Layton – “it is unacceptable that immigrants are coming to Canada” oh, sorry, I missed the last bit “and not able to use their skills.” We will also eliminate the head tax. Mr Martin, why did you impliment the tax and then make a new promise now during this election to eliminate it? Paul Martin – “because we wanted to.” ‘Nuff said.

Sorry, I fell asleep for a minute. Apparently every problem with this country comes back to children says Gilles Duceppe. So Jack Layton will give a tax credit for children. I don’t follow. Oh well. I think I’m tuning out again… energy and gas. All four of them are pretty full of both.

And now we are getting mad at each other for being on American TV at some point in the past. Well, I can think of worse places to be seen in America. For instance, in a Hawaiian police station a la Gordon Campbell.

ON NATIONAL UNITY

And my favourite quote of the evening so far, from none other than Gilles Duceppe: “We’re good neighbours, we can have a fence and landscaping, we can agree what colour to paint the fence, but neighbours can’t come in and paint the bedroom.” I don’t really want to be in your bedroom, sir. And then later… “Canada’s a nice country, I like to visit it. We want to be friendly neighbours, even after we’ve wrecked the house.”