It began as the chilling story of a prowler who, in the dark of night, entered the home of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau to leave a disturbing array of knives and a cryptically threatening note.

It ended in a classically Canadian way. The prowler was, in fact, no prowler. He was just some guy.

Nor was he stalking Trudeau. Ottawa police say he had no idea the Liberal leader and his family lived in the tony Rockcliffe Park home he walked into that August night.

Given that the intruder was completely wazooed at the time, he had no idea of anything much.

All the unidentified 19-year-old knew, according to police, was that the pal at whose place he hoped to crash had told him the back door would be unlocked.

So when, after a night of serious drinking, the young man found a back door unlocked in more or less the right part of town, he did the natural thing. He went in.

What else would a seriously inebriated guy do?

If this were the United States, a teen breaking into the house of a major political leader might have been wasted by armed security.

If this were the United States, the teen might have been armed with a TEC-9 or some other kind of automatic weapon and wasted someone else.

But this is Canada. The teen didn’t have a TEC-9. And there was no armed security.

Instead, the accidental intruder looked blearily around the kitchen that he didn’t quite recognize and thought to himself: Hey, those are nice carving knives.

He took the knives out of their sheaths and he laid them on the floor and he thought of stealing them.

Then according to the police account, he decided that it wouldn’t be very nice to steal all those knives. What if he was in his pal’s house after all? How would he explain this to him?

Hey man; I let myself into the kitchen like you said, but then I stole all your carving knives.

In any case, it seems that by this point the fog of alcohol was lifting. He was coming to the realization that he was in the wrong house, that this was not his friend’s kitchen.

Who knows what gave him the clue? Maybe it was the matching set of I-Heart-Liberals coffee mugs. Maybe it was something else.

The young man sat himself down and wrote a note to whoever owned all of those awesome carving knives and coffee mugs.

We don’t know exactly what the note said. But police reports suggest it read something like: Hey man. You shouldn’t leave your back door unlocked.

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Then the non-prowler left the Trudeau residence. Presumably, he went into the right house through the right unlocked door and crashed.

For a while, Canadians thought they had made the big time again. Reporters dusted off the 1995 story of a knife-wielding prowler who managed to get into 24 Sussex, where he was confronted by the wife of then prime minister Jean Chrétien.

At the time, Aline Chrétien likened that intruder to Forrest Gump.

The more historically-minded recalled the 1868 assassination of Canadian politician Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

Critics attacked the government for not providing Trudeau’s family with full RCMP security.

Trudeau himself said he found the incident chilling. His wife and children immediately decamped to Montreal. Pundits predicted that the exuberant Liberal leader might be forced to curb his mainstreeting ways.

But in the end, none of this was necessary. The Rockcliffe Park episode of 2014 was not a remake of D’Arcy McGee. It wasn’t even a remake of the Aline Chrétien standoff.

Rather, it was just one of those subtle Canadian stories with no obvious moral.

A guy has a few brewskis. He lets himself into the wrong mansion and plays with some knives. No charges are laid. No hard feelings are expressed.

It could have been written by Alice Munro.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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