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“Good night from the campaign trail,” reads the message accompanying a Liberal Party video of the encounter. “Twelve sleeps until election day.”

It’s a scene so mawkishly sentimental that no other leader would even attempt to get away with it. But it’s standard fare for a Liberal campaign that has already dispatched their leader to jog up mountains, canoe down Alberta rivers, spar in boxing rings – and asked the media to go watch.

The political fortunes of Justin Trudeau are yet to be decided by Canada, but whatever happens, the leader cast by many as a lightweight will have gotten there by mounting the most image-conscious campaign in living memory.

“He isn’t running to be a boxer or a canoeist, he’s running to be Prime Minister, which is a different set of credentials,” said Robin Sears, who spent several campaigns in the war room for former NDP leader Ed Broadbent.

Sears knows the overwhelming temptation for Trudeau handlers to put “their guy” in situations that produce winning images. But he maintains those handlers need to resist the urge to rely so much on them.

The Liberals’ 2015 campaign ads all unmistakably seem to emphasize the vitality of their leader.

While Thomas Mulcair ads show the besuited NDP leader in coffee shops or bookshelf-lined law offices, and Harper is relying on folksy, Trudeau’s all show him doing something active: Strolling through Major’s Hill Park in Ottawa, or walking the wrong way up an escalator.