Within the space of a single week Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair each delivered major speeches designed to stake out some critical pre-election territory.

Both opposition leaders chose Toronto as their venue, a decision dictated as much by the city’s status as the national headquarters of the country’s English-language media as by the GTA’s weight in the outcome of next fall’s election.

The similarities stop there.

Trudeau spoke to a non-partisan group made up of McGill University alumni.

Mulcair addressed one of the largest in-between-elections rallies that the federal NDP has ever held.

The Liberal leader spoke of values and denounced what he believes is a blatant Conservative attempt to use the terrorism file to divide Canadians along Muslim and non-Muslim lines.

Mulcair set out the urban agenda of an NDP federal government.

His speech emphasized Toronto’s central place on the municipal map of the country — calling it the most important city in the country — but his prescriptions were generic.

Minus the local references, Sunday’s text could easily serve as a template for similar speeches in Canada’s other big cities.

The Liberal leader’s speech was the more hard-hitting of the two but also the more high-risk.

Fostering discrimination against a minority is one of the most serious charges that an opposition leader can level at a sitting prime minister.

That could be construed as a glaring contradiction since it is Liberal policy to support Harper’s controversial anti-terror legislation, regardless of whether or not the government addresses Trudeau’s concerns about its reach.

By comparison, Mulcair’s speech was a safe one.

It is hardly the first time that a federal leader promises the cities a better deal and there is little revolutionary about adding a seat devoted to urban affairs at the cabinet table of an NDP government.

The most controversial element of the speech — if you can call it that — was the contention that, more so than that of any other (smaller) Canadian city, the success of Toronto is essential to the country’s economic health.

According to party strategists, Mulcair deliberately stuck to bread-and-butter issues the better to bring the economy back on the political radar.

They believe the issue is becoming a liability for the ruling Conservatives. (For the record, so far the latter still score better on the economy than their opposition rivals.)

In the end, the differences between the Trudeau and Mulcair speeches spoke more loudly of distinct pre-election needs than of different priorities.

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Two years into his leadership, Trudeau has not yet quite shaken off the perception that he is a policy lightweight.

At the same time, the Liberals have made the strategic decision to not release their platform until the campaign.

In the absence of a fleshed out policy book, the “values” speech Trudeau delivered last Monday was designed to anchor his political persona to some core principles.

It was also meant to offset the Liberal decision to support Bill-C51 by adding some space between Trudeau and the Conservatives on the larger anti-terror narrative.

The NDP’s event, on the other hand, was at least as important for its form as for the content of Mulcair’s speech.

The past four years have been miserable ones for the New Democrats, with precious little to suggest that they are on the move nationally.

They have endured the untimely death of a much loved federal leader; the loss of power in Nova Scotia; a civil war at the top of Manitoba’s NDP government; unexpected mayoral defeats in Toronto and Winnipeg, and underwhelming provincial results across the country.

Against that backdrop, the successful staging of a major rally in Toronto — a city where the NDP lost a seat since the last election — was meant to at least project some critically needed momentum.

It was also designed to blunt some of the edges of Mulcair’s image.

For all his success or, perhaps, because of it as the prosecutor-in-chief of the government in Commons, his profile outside Quebec remains both lower and not as voter-friendly as Trudeau’s.

That he was under instructions to play nice may explain why Mulcair smiled his way through his Sunday speech. He smiled so hard as to make one wonder whether he was trying to channel Jack Layton.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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