I am currently in North America and my-oh-my does it feel good to be a conservative in the New World at the moment. I even celebrated with a game of golf at North America’s oldest golf course in the beautiful colonial town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, just up from Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. Why mention golf? Be patient, dear readers. Be patient.

Let’s leave the best for last and instead start with the superb news out of Canada. Last week there was a federal by-election in an inner-city Toronto constituency. Justin Trudeau’s left-wing Liberal party has held this seat continuously for over three decades. When the Liberal party had a horrible general election result back in 2011 they still won this seat and won it comfortably. Going into the by-election the Liberals held it by 24 points. The current MP had resigned to take up a ‘reward for service’ perquisite as ambassador to Denmark. The Libs were confident. They parachuted in a woman candidate, Leslie Church, who ticked all of the progressive boxes including having worked in Justin Trudeau’s office and having been chief of staff to Chrystia Freeland, the Minister of Finance and now the Deputy Prime Minister.  So one of the safest seats in Canada for the Trudeau Liberals. A star candidate defending a 24-point cushion in a seat that hasn’t been competitive for the Conservatives since the 1980s. And the Conservative candidate – a white man – surprised everyone by squeaking out a narrow win! The political pundits in Canada were immediately calling it a loss of earthquake proportions. As one left-wing talking head type with close ties to the Libs said here in Canada, ‘If they can lose this seat they can lose every single seat in the country.’ The usual suspects who spent years and years fawning over every brainless utterance and lefty policy Justin Trudeau made and enacted and who hadn’t been able to find anything at all to criticise about his thuggish, authoritarian handling of the pandemic were now saying that Trudeau has got to go. He needs to resign, they wailed. The trouble is that all of the potential replacements are polling as badly as Trudeau, who is some twenty points or more behind the Tories’ Pierre Poilievre.

I don’t know about you but that sure makes me feel good all over. It is also a full-blooded endorsement of the Conservative leader Poilievre’s strategy of taking actual conservative positions, calling out the biased left-leaning media at every opportunity, promising to slash the budget of the national broadcaster and saying he would repeal the Trudeau carbon tax. Remember, Canada is a far more left-wing country than Australia and yet Poilievre now leads strongly amongst the young 18-to-30-year-old crowd. He’s winning in every province in the country save for Quebec. Barring a Lazarus-like recovery, the Trudeau Liberals will get slaughtered in the general election that has to be held sometime in the next 15 months or so, sooner if the coalition government Justin heads with an even more left-wing party collapses.

I said that I was leaving the best for last so you may be wondering what could be better – though probably not because I know Speccie readers are better informed than any others. Well, the US presidential debate was even better news than that dear readers. I had expected President Biden to be bad, really bad. He was in fact far, far worse than I expected. If you were exceptionally kind you would say Biden’s debate performance was rambling, incoherent, mean-spirited (by which I mean, to be clear, a lot more so than Trump’s), repeatedly factually wrong and all while managing to portray a man with senility to an Academy Award level. That’s if you were kind. He was in fact worse than that. Now, the structure of the debate no doubt played into Trump’s hands (though the terms and the moderators were all dictated by the Biden camp in a ‘take it or leave it’ way, with Trump opting to ‘take it’). There was no studio audience which stopped Trump from playing to the crowd. There was no allowed interrupting or allowed back-and-forth discussions which forced Trump to be disciplined. If you were in the Trump camp, I think you’d say this format was as good a one as you could choose. You’d certainly say that now, with the benefit of hindsight.  Plus Trump took advice and was willing to let Biden ramble on and torpedo himself. At one point former president Trump said something along the lines of ‘I didn’t understand a word of the last few sentences of what he just said and I don’t think Joe did either.’ Well, nor did any viewers.

If you judge by the after-debate of all the usual media types who have been supporting Biden and Democrats for eons the debate was a disaster. CNN’s viewers (not noted for being Trump or Republican supporters) gave Trump the win by a 2-to-1 ratio. The talk in left-wing circles immediately turned to the need to get rid of Biden as their candidate for this November’s election. And it is hard to argue with that sentiment. The difficulty is how to do it. Joe has won the nomination. So the only way to get him out is for him to agree to resign. I have no doubt that big-time pressure will be brought to bear on him to do so. Whether he will is just a guess. The betting markets over here have that as still, just, an under 50-50 proposition. But if Biden does step down then his delegates would be freed at the convention and the backroom power brokers will pick the candidate. How will that go down with the disenfranchised centrist Democrats and with independents? The hardest candidate for Trump to face would probably be Michelle Obama though I’d make him a slight favourite even against her. Gavin Newsom is California incarnate and I think he’d do worse than Biden. Were I them, I’d think about a Midwest swing state governor. Time will tell.

But I finish with my favourite small segment of the debate. And this takes us back to golf, a game I grew up playing with my dad most weekends at public courses around Toronto. I got pretty good at one point in my younger days but these days play off a 16 or 17 handicap. Mr Trump, though, is a really good golfer. So during the debate when Joe Biden claimed to have a ‘6 handicap’ (making him a top flight amateur golfer) I nearly choked on my glass of wine. The claim is absurd on its face for a man who can’t walk down stairs and who clearly could not finish 18 holes. Trump’s response was priceless: ‘You’re lying. I’ve seen your swing.’ Trump’s totally right. And if Hunter’s dad will baldly lie about something as irrelevant as his golf game, some viewers might come to the conclusion Joe Biden would lie about anything. Hands up if you think that.