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So much fun, and all in vain. The best part was that, as long as the polls remained close, the argument could go on right up to polling day. Unfortunately, I fear the Trans-Pacific Partnership has put paid to all that. The giant trade deal has essentially drawn a line, with proponents on one side and opponents on the other. The Liberals and NDP are on opposite sides, and the nature of the accord allows for no compromise. You can’t have a coalition in which the partners agree to co-operate, except for the one issue that will immediately set them against one another.

Thomas Mulcair is against it. “I would never be able to support this deal,” he told Postmedia News on Monday. “I’m not going to bring a trade deal to Parliament that’s going to cost 20,000 families their livelihood. Period.”

Justin Trudeau is for it. He’s not willing to say so – not categorically, anyway – because that might suggest he felt Stephen Harper had done a good thing. But he has no choice. The Liberal party, he said Monday, is “resolutely and consistently pro-trade.”

“The idea that the U.S. and Mexico would engage in a trade deal of this size and somehow it would not be in Canada’s interests to not be a part of that deal I think is something we’re going to have to look in to,” he said. Although Liberals will put it to a “fulsome and responsible” discussion, in the end they recognize Canada can’t play wallflower to a pact that includes both its Nafta partners plus Japan and eight other countries.