With the frenzied masses pushing their hysteria to an apex, pumping signs in the air and chanting in chorale, their leader quieted down with their first triumphant platitude.

Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair had very similar weekends.

While Mulcair’s leadership may have a year over Trudeau’s, it’s only now that his infant leadership has begun to crawl. While he was elected as a no-nonsense counter to Harper’s sardonic style, he was also given the task of buttressing the party’s precarious 2011 wins. The groundwork is only beginning to get formed.

But Trudeau’s pirouette onto the national scene kneecapped the scruffy Dipper. With the former Prime Minister’s son entering the fray, equipped with disarming smile and killer charm, like-ability was added to the equation.

With the painful shanking of erstwhile leader Michael Ignatieff at the hands of Canadian Everyman Jack Layton still fresh in the NDP’s memory, the last thing the party wants is that table turned.

So as Trudeau’s natural magnetism played the crowd like a massive, screaming fiddle, Mulcair tried to show the side of the man dedicated to fighting for the working class. Brother, grandfather, son, dad — Tom Mulcair 3.0 made his introduction.

But as the two leaders duelled for attention on their back-to-back events, something got lost in the fray.

While the conventions were supposed to be an introduction to the next step for the party, the two largely fell back onto tropes of old party rhetoric. During Mulcair’s speech, standing amidst two thousand NDP partisans in the new orange heartland of Montreal, he hit on strengthening EI, protecting seasonal workers, bringing manufacturing back to Canada, and all the nice comfort blankets of NDP policy.

His rhetoric might not be different, but the unruly left wing of the Socialist Caucus got on their hind legs just the same, sensing that Mulcair’s plan is to emulate more Obama’s Democrats than Tommy Douglas’ prairie socialism.

In Ottawa, meanwhile, Trudeau beamed as his commanding first ballot win was displayed on the screen. Yet his rhetoric — repairing rifts in the party caused during the Martin putsch, engaging Canadians, fighting Stephen Harper — could just has easily been from 2005, on the other side of a crushing defeat.

Mulcair, too, sounded anachronistic. He spoke like a social democrat trying to squeeze concessions out of a budget, not a leader less than two years away from what could be his crowning election.

The third party thinks it’s second, and the second party thinks it’s third. Cue the Benny Hill theme.

Neither seems to clue in that any road to 24 Sussex Drive comes on the back of convincing middle-aged suburbanite Ontarians that he, not the other guy, are best equipped to handle the economy, protect their pension, and guard against toxic debt floating around the global economy.

No, instead the leaders used what would probably be their best platform of the year to talk a good game about Haper’s dictatorial style, their progressive chops, and why their left-leaning counterpart is wrong for Canada.

Rather than vie for Harper’s base of fiscal hypochondriacs, the two traded blows on who best presents a constituency that has been dallying back and forth between their two parties for the past five years.

So let me spell it succinctly — no path to government goes through the so-called ‘progressive’ vote, and chasing them is a zero sum game.

For every time the Liberals take a step leftward, they lose a foot in the right. Every time the New Democrats try to push the Liberals back to the centre, they forsake a foot in their left.

Canadians are not obsessed with ideology like we tend to think they are — most of the country is small-l liberal — but they do qualify rhetoric. If Trudeau stakes out a claim that the two dangers of Harper’s Canada are that democracy is suffering and Canadians are becoming unengaged, don’t expect the suburban middle-class voter to stick around for the shameless partisan demagoguery that follows. If Mulcair hits only on EI reform and temporary foreign workers — or some variation on that theme — you shouldn’t expect an entrepreneur to vote for that sort of welfare, while he struggles to find capital.

Canadians are starting to get the feeling that Harper’s credentials on the economy were a shade over-stated. But they need a replacement. In this case, it feels like Mulcair and Trudeau are applying for other jobs.

Canadians are looking for an Economist-in-Chief. And economists those two ain’t.