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A Conservative government would rapidly accelerate refugee screening and selection and resettle 20,000 government-assisted refugees before the end of 2016. There would be no limit on the number of privately-sponsored refugees brought to Canada, and an extra $100 million would be spent to support the United Nations’ Refugee Agency in its efforts in the countries bordering Syria, where the overwhelming majority of Syria’s four million refugees have fled.

That’s pretty well exactly what the Trudeau government now proposes as well, give or take the largely immaterial distinctions between government-sponsored and privately sponsored refugees. One could call the eight-week timeline extension for the first 25,000 arrivals from Jan. 1 to sometime around March 1 a “broken promise,” but it is no more worth arguing about than the overall project is worth boasting about.

To make matters even more awkward, to trace to its beginnings the bigoted hysteria that incited a great deal of the public anxiety that Canada’s “national project” for Syrian refugees has had to be reconfigured in order to address and dispel, that prize must go to Stephen Harper.

On Sept. 17, turning to Trudeau and New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair —­ remember him? —­ Harper spoke these words: “These guys would have, in the last two weeks, us throwing open our borders and literally hundreds of thousands of people coming without any kind of security check or documentation.” This was, it should go without saying, an outright fabrication.