I watched the whole thing, minus the closing statements. I'd say:
Blaney/Trost/Lemieux:
- snoozefest, but it's not like any of them has a shot, so whatever.
Obhrai/Chong/O'Leary/Scheer: definitely the most heated of the four debates.
- O'Leary is good at making outrageous statements, but he got slapped down at every turn. I can't imagine anyone being swayed by him who wasn't already predisposed to liking him. I think he'd appeal to hardcore, red meat Conservatives who want someone to spout nonsense, but he'd be a disastrous leader for that party.
- Chong sounds relatively reasonable, but the fact he got booed for supporting a carbon tax shows how much of a chance he has (and his proposal to end all green initiatives is as crazy as anything anyone else is suggesting).
- Scheer looks and sounds like a 12-year-old in his father's suit; I've always thought of him as being like an even blander version of Harper, and everything he did reinforced that image.
- I like Obhrai, the crowd loves him as comic relief, but he's clearly not winning.
O'Toole/Leitch/Alexander/Saxton:
- Saxton continued to be a nonentity.
- Alexander seems terrifyingly vacuous; you'd think a Harvard-educated diplomat would have some substance to him, but he's proof that that's not the case.
- O'Toole seems like Scheer's dorky dad.
- Leitch is crazy. I'm hesitant to call her that, since there's a tendency of using that as a gendered insult, but...she seriously seems like a raving lunatic. She also has a tendency of coming off as incredibly pompous -- possibly a holdover from when she was a surgeon, possibly a reaction to being a woman in a man-dominated profession, but she still comes off as very peevish.
Raitt/Peterson/Bernier: definitely my favourite of the four debates.
- Peterson was surprisingly feisty, and he got in a really good burn on O'Leary (something like "I'm proud to be the only non-politician businessman among the 14 candidates who lives in Canada full-time."). He's still going to be one of the first people out.
- Raitt was wrong about cabinet ministers not meeting with their US counterparts (a pretty easily disproved statement on her part), but apart from that I was really impressed by her. She sounded reasonable, she was articulate, and she seemed like someone I could picture on stage in 2019.
- Bernier is O'Leary-esque in his ability to say insane stuff and not come off as a crazy person. On the one hand he's comfortable in his own skin, but on the other hand he's got zero substance, and I think he'd be a pretty risky candidate.
On the whole I'd group them into:
- solid: Raitt, O'Toole, Scheer
- solid, but no chance: Obhrai, Peterson, Chong
- insane: Bernier, O'Leary, Leitch
- zero chance, for good reason: Saxton, Trost, Lemieux, Blaney
- so dumb it's kind of a miracle he didn't choke on his own tie: Alexander