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With voter support for the New Democratic Party surging to heights not seen since the 1980s and the prospect of a tight three-way race in October’s elections emerging as something wholly new to the alchemy of campaign strategies, the one thing that’s showing no signs of any change at all is the pathetic unseriousness of this country’s debates about foreign policy.

The histrionics over that lurid Conservative Party electioneering advertisement — the one that targeted Liberal leader Justin Trudeau against a backdrop of stills from a jihadist snuff video — is a particularly embarrassing case in point. Even a profound rupture in global security and an unfolding human tragedy of colossal, historic proportions will get reduced, in Canadian federal politics, to a low contest of cartoonishly obtuse and parochial talking points.

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First, here’s what’s happening in the real world.

The mass atrocities that continue to be inflicted upon the people of Iraq and Syria beggar the imagination. The response of the United Nations, the United States and the NATO countries, Canada included, has been to deliberately and consistently replicate the alibis that gave succour to the mass murderers of the 1990s in Kosovo and Bosnia — where help came too late for at least 100,000 innocents — and in Rwanda, where a genocide carried off 800,000 people and rescue never came at all.