On the first sitting day of the House of Commons since her defection, former Conservative MP Eve Adams kept a low profile. Anyone looking for a preview of how she would stack up in debate against Finance Minister Joe Oliver in the GTA riding of Eglinton-Lawrence will have to wait.

But it will take more than a few bouts of sparring in question period to put Liberal minds to rest over the latest addition to Justin Trudeau’s caucus.

A week after the Liberal leader rolled out the red carpet for Adams’s floor crossing the episode remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma for most Liberals.

On that score a weekend trip to Vancouver that featured a handful of conversations with veteran party insiders on the West Coast mostly confirmed that the move has baffled Liberals from coast to coast.

Those insiders — like most observers — start from the premise that Trudeau’s team of advisers is a seasoned one. In their minds, such battle-hardened strategists would or should have expected both the editorial backlash and the internal discontent that attended the decision to bring Adams and — by the same token — former Stephen Harper confidant Dimitri Soudas on board.

Few buy the line that Adams is so ideally placed to take on Oliver on the battlefield of the Conservative income-splitting measure as to be worth her weight in political gold.

As flawed as the policy of allowing parents to split their income for tax purposes may be, it does not have the legs to move mountains of votes that a tax hike for instance would have.

In the same breath, most of them dismiss the notion that Soudas has such invaluable insights on what makes a now-familiar prime minister tick on a debate podium — as suggested among others by former Conservative minister Stockwell Day — as to make signing up his fiancée an irresistible proposition.

If anything, Adams’s inclusion on the Trudeau team has more to do with a dogged Liberal quest for deterrence on the field of dirty tricks than with making inroads in voting intentions.

Conservative spin doctors have been quietly bragging about having collected dirt on Trudeau ever since he ran for the leadership.

Coming as it does from a take-no-prisoners rival camp, the threat has certainly been preying on the minds of Liberal strategists.

Pre-emptively mitigating potential damage is a part of their job description that they have been taking to heart.

The swift ousting last fall of two Liberal MPs from caucus over allegations of improprieties involving two female NPD MPs was partly based on the (wrong) assumption that if Trudeau did not act quickly Thomas Mulcair would crucify him for turning a blind eye to sexual harassment.

Trudeau also defused a potential landmine when he admitted to taking tokes of marijuana around the family pool and — in the same breath — endorsed a Liberal resolution to legalize the practice.

In a competitive election every campaign day that is spent putting down a fire instead of spreading the party’s message is a lost one.

Allegations that would be laughed off the front pages for their flimsiness over a couple of news cycle in between elections take on a life of their own in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a five-week campaign.

The NDP got a taste of that at the tail end of the 2011 election when Sun News cited unnamed sources saying police found its leader Jack Layton naked in a Toronto massage parlour in 1996. His campaign was forced to go in damage-control mode at a time when it should have been building on its momentum.

The Conservative war room may not have any dirt worth dishing out on Trudeau next fall.

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If he is privy to embarrassing secrets, Soudas may draw a line at sharing every detail of the inside knowledge acquired over years spent at the prime minister’s side with the Liberals.

But the fact that Trudeau has brought under his tent — at some political cost to himself and his party — a backroom operator he would have been expected not to touch with a ten-foot pole speaks to the potential for the upcoming election war to go nuclear.

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