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Now that the re-election campaign has begun in earnest, Mr. Harper is more like a hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist, rejoicing in the death of “jihadists” at the hands of Canadian troops.

When Tom Mulcair, the NDP leader, asked when the prime minister decided to mislead Canadians and send troops into combat, Mr. Harper saw the opportunity to counter-punch.

“I know the opposition thinks it is a terrible thing to stand up to jihadists. I know they think it a terrible thing that some of those jihadists got killed when they fired on Canadian troops. I don’t know what other militaries are doing, but I know that ours are doing exactly what this Parliament asked them to do,” he said.

I took two things from that exchange. One was that the NDP is comfortable in its position opposing the mission in Iraq, unlike the Liberals, whose leader did not raise the issue. Secondly, the Conservatives are happy positioning themselves as the only party that will take “a prominent role in the global fight against the evil of terrorism,” as a fundraising letter that went out Tuesday put it.

Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, is “playing a risky game, trying to score political points” and opposing the mission, the letter said, an exercise in hypocrisy that even the most unthinking of the Conservative zombie army might have found ironic.

Another theme we are likely to see repeated again and again until election day is that when the Conservatives say how much they support “our troops,” the opposition parties trot out the terrible job the government has done standing up for veterans.