OTTAWA - Justin Trudeau is in a flip-flop pickle, the first party leader in this election campaign who finds himself taking not one, not two, but three different positions on what appears to be a top-of-mind issue for many voters.

And, boy, did Stephen Harper have fun with that one to kick off his Monday morning at the beginning of week five of this long campaign.

That issue is federal government deficits. Trudeau’s take runs from indifferent, to bad, to good.

The indifferent approach was best summed up by the Liberal leader back in early 2014 when he famously told a CPAC interviewer that “the budget will balance itself.”

That laissez-faire attitude was quickly criticized by his Conservative opponents but it was one he had done little to dispel until earlier this year when he decided balanced budgets were a good thing.

In April, he told reporters, “Our platform will be fully costed, fiscally responsible and a balanced budget.”

He did it again in July.

“I’ve committed to continuing to run balanced budgets,” Trudeau told Liberal supporters at a rally in Markham, Ont. earlier this summer. “In fact, it is Conservatives who run deficits, Liberals balance budgets. That’s what history has shown.”

OK. So six weeks ago, the position of the Liberal leader was: Deficits are bad and he would avoid them.

Two weeks later, the election campaign was on and a few days after that, there was the first leaders’ debate. Trudeau hammered Harper for turning surpluses built up by the Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin into deficits.

No matter that MP John McCallum, a former bank chief economist and one of Trudeau’s top economic advisors said on Sunday that running deficits is just what should have happened in response to the 2008 fiscal crisis. To Trudeau, those deficits disqualify Harper as a steward of our economy.

And now the pickle.

Last Thursday in Oakville, Ont., Trudeau said to heck with balanced budgets. To heck with what “history has shown”, that “Liberals balance budgets.”

He’d run deficits of up to $10 billion a year until 2019.

So, on Monday morning, as we started week five of this long campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper started off his day in front of his supporters by skewering Trudeau’s deficit flips and flops.

“He’s gone from saying, well, deficits don’t matter because the budget will balance itself to look, we’re going to have a deficit” — third party observers like the Parliamentary Budget Office have said we’ll run one this year no matter what — “and isn’t it an awful thing and now, no, I want to run deficits because they’re a good thing.”

The Conservative supporters ate up the PM’s comments.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair also slammed Trudeau’s deficit pretzel.

“I'm tired of watching governments put that debt on the backs of future generations,” Mulcair told reporters.

Both Mulcair and Harper still have some work to do convincing voters their own fiscal plans won’t result in further unnecessary deficits.

But to Liberals, like McCallum on Sunday, Trudeau’s new “honesty” that balanced budgets are no longer important is a virtue.

To Harper Monday, it was just another sign the Liberals don’t know what they’re doing.

“We’ve got a plan and we’re sticking to it,” he told the morning rally. “That’s why Canada is doing relatively well. We cannot afford people who are not ready, changing their plan every couple of weeks.”