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I may stand alone here, probably do, but I was grateful Thursday, as waves of emotion washed over the country and the world at the picture of little Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach, for a prime minister who didn’t entirely yield to it.

Alan, his five-year-old brother Ghalib and their mother Rehenna drowned, with eight others, when their tiny boat flipped over in heavy waves. They are among an estimated 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, who have drowned this summer in the very same fashion, desperately trying to get to Europe — to get somewhere, anywhere, safe — from swollen Turkish migrant camps.

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Now, Stephen Harper may not be by nature a warm and fuzzy guy, but in remarks he made Thursday at a Surrey, B.C., campaign office, it was plain he was shaken.

When he and Laureen saw the picture, he said, their thoughts went immediately to their own son Ben, now a towering young man, and how he was at Alan’s age, “running around like that,” and in the “that,” you knew all he was remembering — the way boys of three are always in motion, chattering and banging about and falling and bouncing back like rubber balls, and how you can’t take your eyes off them, not for a second.