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When Justin Trudeau, Tom Mulcair and Stephen Harper meet at tonight’s Munk Debate on foreign policy, they will besubject to a format organizers hope will stimulate genuine discourse and short circuit the increasingly annoying pre-fab talking points all three men have used to turn previous debates into duelling election ads. And you have to hope organizers will succeed in their endeavour, if only because figuring out what role this country should play in international affairs suddenly became a major campaign issue at the beginning of the month, after a photo of a dead three-year-old gave Canadians a crash course in the four-year-old Syrian refugee crisis.

At first glance, Harper will enter tonight’s event with a certain momentum. A weekend poll placed the Liberals just a point ahead of the Conservatives in a three-way race that has been log jammed for the past four weeks, with Mulcair and the NDP slipping to third (and actually below the margin of error). The reason for the Tories’ shift from third place to a close second has been attributed in part to what is now being referred to as “the niqab effect” – growing support for Harper’s pledge to ban the wearing of the niqab, a face veil worn by some Muslim women, and any other face covering during citizenship swearing in ceremonies. One of Harper’s more memorable quotes from last week’s French-language debate was that he would never tell his daughter a woman has to cover her face because she’s a woman, a line that built upon previous comments from the prime minister contending that wearing the face veil at a ceremony to become a part of this country doesn’t reflect Canadian values.