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Then he said this: “There are millions, millions of displaced persons that we know of in camps etc. There are tens of millions of other people whose survival, day-to-day survival, is in jeopardy. There is no — as I’ve said earlier, notwithstanding how terrible this is — there is no refugee-based solution alone to that problem.”

After saying again, as he did last week, that the photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach had profoundly moved him (“the first thing you see is our own son as a two-year-old running on the beach”), Harper continued: “We can admit thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of refugees and we are still going to see those kinds of images. So we’ve got to be doing a lot more than that.”

A rousing call to action, it wasn’t. There are worse things than writing books, true. That will be small comfort, though, for candidates running under the blue banner, particularly for the first time

That is of course correct, speaking in the beancounter-ese. The problem is overwhelming and much bigger than any one individual life. But other leaders, including Conservative Toronto Mayor John Tory, and others with impeccably blue credentials such as former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier, have taken a different tone. Rather than focus on what won’t work, they urge that more be done. In sticking rather grimly to the mantra that 10,000 additional refugees over three years is enough, regardless of the shift in sentiment this past week, Harper has declined an opportunity to lead.

For someone weighed down with his personal baggage – the sense that, though smart and determined, he has a heart of stone – this amounts to a quiet, though unmistakable statement of principle: I will not place more stock in a single life lost, or even thousands of lives lost, than cold logic dictates — even if it hurts me politically, even if it means we lose.