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The Moment. In this daily feature until Election Day, theNational Postcaptures a telling moment in time from the 2015 campaign trail.

As Thomas Mulcair delivered his opening statement at the French leader’s debate on Friday, the average English-speaking Canadian might have assumed that the NDP leader spoke in flawless, unaccented Montreal French.

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He is, after all, a lifelong Quebecer, the NDP’s former Quebec lieutenant and a longtime member of the province’s national assembly.

But to the born-and-raised Francophone, Mulcair occasionally slipped on “eu’s” and “au’s.” And — whatever his fluency — it was all tinged with the unmistakable accent of a man who grew up in an Anglophone household.

“He had quite a native command … but there’s an intonational overlay that was sometimes not 100%,” said Shana Poplack, director of the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.

And so it is with the other politicians who joined Mulcair on the debate stage on Friday. While the party leaders all generally speak the same brand of English, in French their speech reveals a rich tapestry of where they’re from, how they grew up and even what kind of voter they’re targeting.