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In Stephen Harper’s tightly fought and closely choreographed re-election campaign, it was a script-shredding nightmare. A drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach, in a photograph that transfixed the world and riveted public attention to the Syrian refugee crisis, had been hoping to make it to Canada.

The quickly crafted response was this: A terrible, heartbreaking tragedy, yes, but it has nothing to do with the Canadian government. And that is what one might reasonably infer from a matter-of-fact statement released by Citizenship and Immigration Canada bureaucrats only hours after the story of the Canadian connection broke.

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The department’s files contained “no record” of an application for little Alan Kurdi and his family, but rather for Alan’s four cousins and their parents, Mohammad and Ghouson Kurdi, and the application had failed for lack of proper documents.

But the scramble to distance the government from that dead child on the beach has deeply divided Conservative campaign advisers, some of whom are smart enough to know that the appearance of a dodge can only make things look worse.