OTTAWA — By almost any standard, Justin Trudeau is the immediate political casualty of the war of words that attended the debate over Canada’s role in the international coalition against the Islamic State.

It is not that Trudeau necessarily chose the wrong camp — the jury will be out on that for a while — but having picked a side in the most sensitive policy debate to have come his way since becoming leader, he then failed to distinguish himself in action.

For more than a year, pollsters have reported that a plurality of Canadians see Trudeau as the prime minister-in-waiting. But the Liberal performance they were given to watch this week was more reflective of a third-place opposition party than of an aspiring government.

While the Conservatives and the NDP both made substantive cases for and against Canada taking on a combat role against the Islamic State, the Liberals never really got beyond their leader’s initial contention that the government had failed to make a case for war.

Trudeau himself seemed determined to play second string, first by delegating the lead Liberal role in the House of Commons debate to foreign affairs critic Marc Garneau and then by dispensing with the presentation of an alternative of his own to the government’s plan.

On this issue, the Liberals — who once wrote some of the most distinguished pages in Canada’s foreign policy book — let Mulcair do the heavy lifting.

Indeed, as of now, anyone seeking clarity on the Liberal policy on the Islamic State file should probably skip Hansard and go straight to the NDP website for the details. On Tuesday, Trudeau joined every other opposition member but one in supporting the roadmap sketched out by the New Democrats.

It is a fact that the House of Commons offers less centre-stage opportunities for Trudeau than for Mulcair who, by virtue of his official Opposition role, is the prime minister’s de facto vis-à-vis.

Still, it is not much of a leap to argue that from the same second-tier place, former interim leader Bob Rae, to name just one of Trudeau’s predecessors, could have articulated a more effective rationale for the Liberal position.

Whether he would, in this instance, have wanted to do so is another matter.

Trudeau has ruffled Liberal feathers on other issues in the past, most notably when he decreed that in the future his caucus would be bound to the pro-choice party line on abortion rights.

But in this case, his chosen stance does not seem to sit easily with part of the party’s foreign policy brain trust including, among others, Montreal MP Irwin Cotler who abstained from the vote on Tuesday.

In his early days as Liberal leader, Jean Chrétien initially made a mess of his party’s position in the first Gulf War. And Harper himself, as leader of the opposition, ended up on the wrong side of Canadian public opinion (and of history) on the Iraq war. The wounds Trudeau inflicted on himself this week need not be fatal.

But his management of the issue is unlikely to help the party with the moderate conservative voters that the Liberals need to woo if they are going to beat Harper next year.

To offset that, party strategists can always hope that Trudeau’s stance makes the Liberals more bullet-proof to NDP election attacks in traditionally war-adverse Quebec.

In 2003 Jean Chrétien’s decision to sit out the American-led Iraq war raised his party to the top of the popularity charts in Quebec (where it remained until the sponsorship scandal broke out a year later).

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But there is little evidence that the matter of Canada’s combat role in fighting the Islamic State is about to elicit the same passions.

The Bloc Québécois could not be bothered to come up with a position on Canada’s proposed combat role until a few hours before the vote.

Premier Philippe Couillard is on the record as supporting the notion that Canada step up to the plate of the coalition.

At a weekend gathering of the Parti Québécois the issue that has consumed the headlines and the federal conversation for the past two weeks never came up.

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

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