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My Ottawa neighbourhood, known as New Edinburgh, is not where one would go to escape politics.

Inside of just a few weeks last spring, there were two sightings of party leaders on the nearby sidewalks. Stephen Harper, out for a stroll with a bag of chips in hand, stopped to admire the blue carpet one of my neighbours had chosen for the porch steps. Not long afterward, on the same street, neighbours spotted a shirtless runner. The Haida tattoo on his shoulder gave him away — it was Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, out for a Saturday run.

Beyond their different approaches to getting fresh air, Harper and Trudeau have also given us some radically different ideas about neighbours and neighbourhoods in the past few days of this election campaign.

If this election is distilling down to a potentially ugly culture war in the final two weeks before the vote, much could rest on how Canadians feel about the people living around them.

Trudeau gave an important speech in Brampton on Sunday — one that all those who have dismissed him as ‘not ready’ probably ought to see for themselves. This being an election and all, it was analyzed immediately afterward through the prism of political strategy — for its ability to mobilize support, to give the Liberals the impression of momentum, and so on.

That analysis skipped over an important theme in the speech: the connections between neighbours. It could be a defining factor in those Ontario ridings filled with new Canadians, where the polls are saying that many races are shaping up to be tight contests between the Liberals and Conservatives.

Simply put, Trudeau is clearly gambling that if Canadians have to choose between generosity and suspicion toward their neighbours, they will summon up their generous side. If that’s your view, the Brampton speech on Sunday probably spoke to your Canada in a way we haven’t seen in this country in a long time.

This isn’t an insignificant or risk-free conviction in our cynical national political culture. It’s based on the idea that Canadians fundamentally believe that the country is big enough for all of us — and that’s not an easy sell in economically stretched regions.

All elections, to some extent, feature some kind of tension between fear and hope. Whether you want to call these cultural debates ‘dog-whistle’ or ‘hot-button’ politics, the basic underlying question in the ballot box could depend on whether your neighbours make you feel fearful or hopeful. All elections, to some extent, feature some kind of tension between fear and hope. Whether you want to call these cultural debates ‘dog-whistle’ or ‘hot-button’ politics, the basic underlying question in the ballot box could depend on whether your neighbours make you feel fearful or hopeful.

While Trudeau compared Harper’s decade-long reign to a film with too many sequels, the Brampton speech also brought another movie to mind: Gran Torino, in which Clint Eastwood’s character is transformed from an angry, get-off-my-lawn guy to a neighbourhood hero.

Conservatives, judging from a Friday press conference, are gambling that such transformations only happen in movies. In case you missed it, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander and Women’s Minister Kellie Leitch announced the establishment of a special RCMP “tip line” for citizens to report people they suspect of indulging in “barbaric cultural practices.”

Already, the announcement has sparked widespread parody, including the website reportyourneighbour.ca, which lays out all the ways in which Conservative policies also could be regarded as culturally offside, if not “barbaric”.

All jokes aside, Conservatives wouldn’t be kicking off an eleventh-hour culture war in this campaign without evidence that it works. Whipping up a new round of antipathy to the niqab is believed to have yielded an upward move in the polls for Conservatives in recent days and an accompanying, downward slide for Tom Mulcair and the New Democrats.

In Winnipeg last week, Conservative MP Joyce Bateman presented a list of Liberal candidates she alleged to be anti-Israel, clearly believing it would be a crowd-pleaser at a debate sponsored by B’nai B’rith. It was not. She was booed down by many attendees and at least one shouted “shameful” as she tried to read out her list.

Some of the people on that list were on stage with Trudeau in Brampton on Sunday. In tone and in substance, Trudeau’s speech was a pole apart from the act of reading aloud names on an enemies’ list (my words, not Bateman’s, by the way) or snitching to the RCMP on your neighbour.

As Trudeau did at a big Montreal policy convention in 2014, he warned Liberals not to cast anyone as enemies, even — and especially — Conservatives.

“In the end, we are all Canadians,” he said. “Conservatives are not our enemies. They’re our neighbours. They want what’s best for their country, just like we do. They want safe communities and a growing economy. They want better jobs and more opportunities for their kids. They want their country to stand for something in the world, with the tenacity to solve big problems.”

All elections, to some extent, feature some kind of tension between fear and hope. It usually plays out in the realm of the economy and jobs — votes decided on the basis of whether people are afraid or optimistic about change.

This election, for good or ill, has put a new wrinkle into that classic tension — testing Canadians on their own relationships with their fellow citizens. Whether you want to call these cultural debates “dog-whistle” or “hot-button” politics, the basic underlying question in the ballot box could depend on whether your neighbours make you feel fearful or hopeful.

In my neighbourhood, people seem to be pretty open-minded. They wave and say hello to politicians, whether they’re walking in one direction or running in another.

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada’s best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.

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