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It is difficult to pinpoint a turning point in the 40 days of boilerplate hubris and scripted outrage that was Canada’s 43rd election campaign. But if I had to pick a moment where Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer lost the election, it was when he was standing on an east-end Montreal stage, demonstrating in his broken French just how out of sync he is with the country he sought to govern.

TVA’s French-language debate on Oct. 2 was a chance for the federal leaders to hash out policy for an outsized, mostly francophone audience. Time and again, Scheer found himself on the wrong side of mainstream political consensus in Quebec.

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To wit: he couldn’t admit he was personally against a woman’s right to choose, much less square this belief with his party’s position on keeping the door on the abortion debate slammed shut. Ditto gay marriage and sexual-minority rights. Ditto medically assisted dying, in which he tried to obfuscate his own clear opposition to the concept — even though the modern iteration of it was born in Quebec.