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At the beginning of the Munk debate on foreign policy Monday, moderator Rudyard Griffiths welcomed the participants, then leaped in with one of the great moral questions of our age.

“Right now, the world is witnessing the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War,” he said, speaking to NDP Leader Tom Mulcair. If the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant doesn’t justify a military response, he continued, what exactly would?

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What Mulcair said in response — he slipped around the question, basically, before returning to it later — was perhaps less interesting than how he said it.

Faced with a moral dilemma that has vexed and divided generations of human rights activists, he turned to the camera. He smiled. He spoke in warm tones. He gave the impression, in other words, of a man determined to appear even-keeled, no matter what the topic.

That moment represented nothing new. Long before this campaign, the New Democratic Party began positioning Mulcair as the calm, responsible, even moderate, option for change. By doing so, they hoped to counter the image of a hotheaded Mulcair (“Angry Tom”) while presenting a more mature alternative to the younger, notionally flighty Justin Trudeau.