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Instead, the PM and his staff couldn’t resist. They drop in these tone-deaf lines, the fourth of five paragraphs: “As Canadians, we will not surrender to hatred, and let attacks like these divide us. In the face of cowardly violence and fear-mongering, we will not compromise our most cherished values – freedom, democracy, diversity and inclusion.”

It’s unbelievable, to use the Cirillo death as a prop for yet another pablum lecture about fear mongering and diversity. You’ve got to be pretty oblivious to not realize how inappropriate this sounds.

While the paragraph is fine in isolation, it’s how and why Trudeau uses it that’s the problem.

It already rubs people the wrong way, how Trudeau goes around condescendingly lecturing the country as if everyone is a heartbeat away from putting on a white hood.

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But here’s the thing: They didn’t downplay that fourth paragraph. It’s the pull quote that they’re featuring online, the part they’re drawing the most attention to. As the saying goes: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

It’s bad enough that this is all a subtle form of election campaigning. But to do it while honouring a Canadian solider killed by an ISIS supporter is stooping to a whole new low.

And make no mistake about it. This is campaigning.

Earlier this month, while speaking at a fundraiser, Trudeau made it clear that his campaign strategy was going to be one of the oldest tricks in the political book – to repeatedly portray the Conservatives as mean and nasty, to not argue against their policies but to allege that they’re bad people.