Justin Trudeau's put-up-or-shut-up moment

Seven years to the day after that sunny morning in 2015 when he and his new cabinet walked down the tree-lined drive to Rideau Hall, Justin Trudeau visited a community centre in a working-class neighbourhood of apartment towers and public housing in northeastern Toronto.

Inside a second-floor meeting room – scuffed laminate floors, fluorescent lights, two portable air conditioners and a foosball table – 34 chairs were arranged in a circle. Families and seniors from the area filled 31 of the chairs.

Following a short wait, Trudeau entered the room. After a general greeting he proceeded around the circle — meeting each person individually, leaning in, making eye contact — before taking a seat between Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Michael Coteau, the local Liberal MP.

After briefly reviewing the fall economic statement his government had tabled the day before, Trudeau told the group he was there to hear directly from them “on how things are going, on what you’re preoccupied with, what issues you’re facing and how we can be helpful on things.”

There was no mention of his government’s anniversary, no reminiscing about that day in 2015 or any of the 2,557 days that followed. This was clearly not a moment for celebration.

​It was still a friendly room — Coteau won the riding with 59 per cent of the vote in 2021 — and there was applause when Trudeau talked about doubling the GST rebate. But the uncomfortable facts of life in November 2022 kept creeping in. A mother with two young children talked about how things are getting more expensive. An older woman said she was thankful for food banks — but also thankful that she lived in Canada.

“We know that too many Canadians are dealing with the rising cost of living,” Trudeau told the news conference that followed. “We hear you and we’re there for you.”

Later, Trudeau visited a food bank and community kitchen in Mississauga. One of the managers told him the centre had gone from serving 600 people per month before the pandemic to serving 1,000 people per month.

While Trudeau was confronting the difficult reality of his eighth year as prime minister, the leader of the Official Opposition was assigning blame. That same day, before a friendly audience in downtown Toronto, Pierre Poilievre delivered a speech entitled “The Bursting Bubble.” In it, the Conservative leader argued that everything from inflation to housing prices to a purported lack of oil and gas development was the fault of too much government regulation and too much government spending.

“This is the fundamental misunderstanding of Justin Trudeau and his government,” Poilievre said. “Government cannot give you anything without first taking it away.“

A few weeks later, Poilievre put his basic complaint in less philosophical terms. “Do you ever feel like everything is broken in Canada?” he asked in a video that focused on the scourge of opioid abuse.

Everything feels broken. Let’s fix it. pic.twitter.com/xxAwtGon1P

— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) December 5, 2022

Those first weeks of Trudeau’s eighth year in power were not uneventful. Parliament passed legislation to create a new dental benefit for low-income families. The government released a new Indo-Pacific strategy, a national climate adaptation strategy and a critical minerals strategy. Trudeau pointedly criticized the Ontario government’s latest use of the notwithstanding clause and nominated four new independent senators. The prime minister became the first world leader to appear on RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Liberal Party won a byelection in the Ontario riding of Mississauga—Lakeshore.

But the most evocative idea of the fall came in the form of that question posed by Poilievre. And it didn’t escape Trudeau’s notice — or ire. In an interview with CBC News in his West Block office one afternoon in mid-December, a day after that byelection win, Trudeau brought up Poilievre’s line unprompted.

“Canadians are still — and have reason to be — really optimistic about our future as a country, even though, yeah, it’s really tough right now,” he said.

Trudeau said he believes that, in a changing and challenging world, Canada’s fundamentals and values set it up for success. He pointed to the way the country came through the pandemic as evidence that Canadians overcome tough times.

The contrast between that attitude and the idea that Canada is “broken” is something Trudeau said inspires him, and should inspire Canadians as well.

“That focus on what has made Canadians successful through really difficult times should be and is energizing,” he said.

On that day in mid-December, Trudeau seemed particularly energized. His responses to questions were long and effusive, running from one idea to the next.

A government seeking re-election after nearly a decade in office can’t afford to look as tired as Trudeau’s government did in the spring and summer of 2022. And Trudeau is trying to do something no prime minister has done in 114 years — lead his party to victory in a fourth consecutive federal election. (A bronze bust of the last prime minister to do it, Wilfrid Laurier, stands guard in the hall outside Trudeau’s West Block office.)

But prime ministers are measured not simply by enthusiasm, but by what they do and how well they meet the moment.

In the early days of Trudeau’s time as Liberal leader, some of his advisers took to collecting examples of media reports that referred to events or debates as Trudeau’s “first real test” — the joke being that journalists were always coming up with new moments that were truly going to take the measure of the man.

It’s fair to say Trudeau has passed a few tests over the past seven years. He is now the tenth longest-serving prime minister and he could rank as high as seventh before he faces the electorate again.

The next test — perhaps the final one — is the time that remains between now and the next election. If the confidence-and-supply agreement with the NDP holds, Trudeau has a little less than three years to restate the case for himself — and build a stronger foundation under the promise of 2015.

The promise was “better.”

“This is Canada,” Trudeau said, standing on a stage in the middle of a hockey arena in Brampton, Ont., two weeks before election day in 2015. “And in Canada, better is always possible.”

That scene was a show of force. Trudeau was addressing a large rally meant to convey the party’s building momentum. Video from the event — Trudeau in full rhetorical flight, cheered on by 7,000 sign-waving supporters — would be cut into one of the campaign’s final television ads.

“Better is always possible” was Trudeau’s four-word rejoinder to more than nine years of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. With a few exceptions, Harper governed like a careful incrementalist, trying to slowly nudge the centre of Canadian politics to the right. Part of that project was a steady effort to chip away at both the ambition and the capacity of the federal government. Trudeau promised more. And he promised to deal with the unaddressed problems that had started piling up — climate change, reconciliation, economic inequality.

“There are many, many issues where Harper and I part ways,” Trudeau said that day in Brampton. “But none is greater than this: Stephen Harper lacks ambition for our country.”

Caution and risk avoidance have never been hallmarks of Trudeau’s style. The 88-page platform the Liberals ran on in 2015 offered 353 promises — nearly twice as many as the Conservatives ran on in 2006.

Such a long list of promises might simply reflect the number of things a government could — or should — be doing to address the problems of a complex modern society. But it hasn’t always been obvious over the past seven years that Trudeau built a government capable of doing and accounting for all those things; a “mandate tracker” rolled out in 2017 has been collecting dust since June 2019.

Asked to assess the prime minister’s strengths and weaknesses, one former government official said Trudeau can be relentless in pursuing his vision and is most concerned with reconciliation, climate change and the government’s broader equality agenda. (CBC News spoke with multiple sources in and around the Trudeau government for this piece. Some were granted confidentiality so that they could speak candidly.)

The prime minister is less focused on classic economic issues, the former official said — although Liberals would argue that climate change, reconciliation and equality are fundamentally economic matters. Trudeau is deliberative and reflective, likes to hear different perspectives and asks smart, pointed questions of the officials who brief him, the former official said. But Trudeau’s administration can take an unduly long time to make decisions, the official added. And it doesn’t like to say no — it wants to fix every problem. (Many of these observations have been corroborated by other sources.)

That same ex-official said Trudeau is an adept and thoughtful chair of cabinet. Former finance minister Bill Morneau apparently has a different opinion of his former boss — in a new book, Morneau reportedly claims that Trudeau’s “management and interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking.”

In its public statements, Trudeau’s government is often long on ideals and short on explanations and details. It has struggled at times to live up to those ideals; if you’re going to call yourself a feminist, you can expect to be castigated every time your actions fall short. And even if the Trudeau government’s record of keeping promises compares reasonably well with its predecessors (none of them had a pandemic to deal with), it’s not hard to draw up a list of unfulfilled hopes.

The promise of electoral reform crashed and burned spectacularly. Talk of pharmacare and peacekeeping simply didn’t amount to much. It’s still not clear what the Canada Infrastructure Bank will accomplish. Journalists in Ottawa will point out that Canada’s access to information system remains a shambles.

The last seven years also have witnessed an array of uniquely Trudeaupian scandals and controversies — from the trip to the Aga Khan’s private island to the SNC-Lavalin affair to Julie Payette’s appointment as Governor General to the trip to Tofino on the first national day for truth and reconciliation.

To his many critics, Trudeau will always be an ex-drama teacher, a dilettante, a disappointment. But the outline of a larger legacy has emerged.

The Canada Child Benefit and other reforms that led to a significant drop in poverty. A national price on carbon and a sea-change in federal climate policy. Marijuana legalization. Senate reform. A national child-care system. Launching a program that resettled more than 40,000 Syrian refugees and overseeing a historic increase in immigration.

Buying the Trans Mountain pipeline. Contending with Donald Trump. Governing through a pandemic. Signing that confidence-and-supply agreement with the NDP. Challenging the political orthodoxy on balanced budgets. Partially reversing a three-decade-long shrinking trend in the federal government.

There also have been some important milestones: a Liberal Party that is unreservedly pro-choice, the first gender-balanced federal cabinet, the first prime minister to march in a Pride parade, the first Indigenous Governor General, the first Indigenous Supreme Court justice.

“Quibbles aside,” the economist Armine Yanlnizyan wrote in a recent column, “show me a more progressive federal Canadian government over the past half century.”

Some New Democrats might reply that the competition for that title is rather weak. But it’s possible that the Trudeau decade — however flawed the government and its chief spokesperson — will have established a new progressive benchmark for the things a federal government must do, one with which future governments, even Conservative ones, might have to contend.

Trudeau has expressed the hope that this period might be a turning point for Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples. It was a question about reconciliation during the leaders’ debates in last year’s election that prompted him to muse that the “cynicism” of those who “discount” progress is “one of the enemies of progressive politics.”

But if his commitment to reconciliation is now open to cynicism, Trudeau might have to take some blame for that.

Two days after that speech in Brampton in 2015, Trudeau appeared at a televised town hall organized by Vice Media. He said a government led by him would commit to eliminating all drinking water advisories in Indigenous communities within five years. It was a worthy idea. But it’s not obvious that timeline was ever feasible.

In the fall of 2015, there were 105 long-term drinking water advisories in place in Indigenous communities across the country. But in the years that followed, new long-term advisories came into effect and the federal government also expanded its criteria to include water systems not previously covered. After seven years, the federal government says it has invested $5.6 billion and lifted 137 advisories. But 31 remain in effect.

Had Trudeau not made such a specific commitment, he might now have an easier time claiming credit for progress achieved. Then again, without such a promise hanging over it, the machinery of government might have moved even slower.

But this idea of Trudeau’s government as one more interested in talk than action — in “pretty words,” as NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is fond of saying — has haunted it almost from day one.

The sense that this government hasn’t lived up to its promises probably helps to explain why it has failed to regain a majority, said Dan Arnold, who ran polling for the Trudeau government as director of research in the Prime Minister’s Office until his departure last December. Enough progressive voters, feeling let down by the Liberals, have been willing to vote for the NDP, Arnold said in an interview last fall.

“My thought process before I left PMO was very much, ‘This next mandate has to be about delivering on these issues and actually showing results,’“ said Arnold, now chief strategy officer at Pollara, a polling firm. “If the prime minister does choose to run again, I think a lot of the success there does hinge on — has this government actually accomplished these things, or has it been mostly ten years of talk? Something like lifting boil water advisories in all the Indigenous reserves in Canada — I think that becomes a very good example of that.”

This need to demonstrate results applies to much more than the reconciliation file. In a survey of potential Liberal voters published last fall, 70 per cent said the government hadn’t “done much to combat climate change.”

But Trudeau’s desire for big goals apparently was not shaken by the boil-water advisory experience.

Before the 2019 election, Trudeau was presented with a proposal to plant one billion trees over 10 years, part of an effort to combat climate change. After looking at the numbers himself, Trudeau argued that two billion trees — roughly five trees for every Canadian over a decade — was a feasible and worthier target. That became the Liberal promise.

One former adviser frames this impulse in positive terms: Trudeau pushes for better. But the Liberals can be sure the Conservatives and NDP will be eager to turn unplanted trees into a symbol for a whole decade in power if the planting doesn’t go well over the next few years.

The government presented the end of the pandemic as an opportunity for “building back better.” Merely getting back to the old normal has proved challenging.

The Omicron variant of COVID-19 hit shortly after the 2021 election, triggering another round of health restrictions. Then came the convoy protest that gridlocked downtown Ottawa and key border crossings for weeks. That was followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ottawa police should have paid closer attention to intelligence that suggested the Freedom Convoy protesters planned to stay past two days, acting deputy chief Patricia Ferguson told the Public Order Emergency Commission.

Restarting the economy turned out to be harder than many imagined. Instead of a celebration to mark the end of two hard years, exhausted Canadians got unrelenting inflation, snarled supply chains, labour shortages, high gas prices, record-high housing prices, long lines at airports and passport offices, a massive backlog in immigration applications, crowded emergency rooms and shortages of children’s medicine.

At a news conference in late August, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller, speaking as the co-chair of a ministerial “task force on service delivery” belatedly established in June, acknowledged that the government had been “slow” in responding to things like the rush of passport applications. But the government also was slow and unsteady in its response to inflation — and that left it out of step with the public’s mood.

In that interview last fall, Arnold suggested Trudeau’s time in office could be understood as “a story of handling crises.” In the first term it was Donald Trump and the renegotiation of NAFTA. In the second term it was COVID-19. In both cases, enough Canadians thought the government did a good enough job to re-elect the Liberals.

The new crisis is inflation — and the polls aren’t showing much satisfaction with the federal government.

In July, Abacus Data found the public’s feelings toward Trudeau were as bad as they had ever been: 31 per cent said they had a positive view of the prime minister, 51 per cent said they had a negative view. That was not far from how Canadians felt about Stephen Harper shortly before the Conservatives were defeated in 2015. Back then, 27 per cent of respondents said they had a positive view of Harper, while 56 per cent said negative.

Maybe Trudeau’s government should have moved faster in response to inflation — he said in that December interview a reduction in child care fees was fortuitous but conceded that the GST boost, which the NDP pushed for, could have come sooner. But the greater danger for the government, Arnold said, was in seeming “out of touch.” That could be a matter of tone and focus as much as action.

Trudeau has lived a privileged and altogether unusual life, so he is more vulnerable to such a charge than most. But he also should understand the danger of appearing out of touch — because it’s exactly what he said about Harper in that speech in Brampton in 2015.

“Stephen Harper just doesn’t see what you’re going through. When you spend a decade in a motorcade, you don’t have to worry about traffic jams,” Trudeau said. “That’s what happens when you’ve been in power too long.”

Despite the alien aspects of his upbringing, Trudeau’s lifelong relationship with the public has been one of his greatest assets. His willingness and ability to engage with people — unlike the more solitary Harper — has been one of his most valuable strengths. Melanie Paradis, a strategist who advised former Conservative leader Erin OToole, figures Trudeau was at his strongest during the annual town hall tours he did during his first term, when Canadians could see him explaining himself, interacting and empathizing with regular people.

“I think there is a lot of important psychology … around demonstrating a willingness to listen, to hear the complaints of the people, to show compassion and then to go do something about it. His ability to do that was one of his greatest strengths,” Paradis said.

“I don’t know if he still has that ability or if the past two years of the incredible amount of polarization that we’ve seen in this country have made that impossible — which, to be fair, is not entirely on his lap. There were a lot of players, but he certainly hasn’t helped. That’s his greatest weakness.”

At the same time, Trudeau’s very public profile often runs the risk of overexposure. After a bruising election campaign in 2019, there was a sense around the prime minister that Trudeau needed to be less prominent.

The pandemic made large gatherings like town halls impossible, or at least inadvisable. And a town hall in 2023 might be swamped by the shouts and catcalls of those who hate him most, as so many of Trudeau’s campaign events were in the fall of 2021 after he drew a hard line on vaccine mandates. (Someone has made a lot of money printing “F— Trudeau” flags over the past two years.)

During his first and second terms, Trudeau also made semi-regular rounds of phone calls with Canadians who had written to his office with concerns or complaints. It doesn’t appear that he kept up the practice in 2022.

The closest Trudeau has come to recapturing the spirit of those town halls since was (ironically) during his November appearance before the commission investigating his government’s use of the Emergencies Act. On the stand and under oath, Trudeau explained and defended himself at length and in detail. He was engaged, focused and expansive. People who have worked with him say that’s the Trudeau they see behind closed doors.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears before the commission investigating his government's use of the Emergencies Act to clear the convoy protests.

By all accounts, Trudeau came back from an August family vacation in Costa Rica with a spring in his step. “I haven’t seen him this energized in a long time,” said Miller, a friend of Trudeau’s since high school.

While the vacation seems to have been pleasant, there was no moment of soul-searching about the PM’s career path, no pivotal walk in the sand. Instead, Trudeau traces his upbeat mood to a visit to the Calgary Stampede in July.

“It was getting out and seeing crowds again and connecting with people and having conversations,” Trudeau said.

Though he calls himself an introvert, Trudeau feeds off interaction. It’s also how he reads the public’s mood. As Trudeau made a series of stops across the country this summer, he peppered his director of policy with ideas and requests based on the conversations he was having.

Not everyone was perfectly happy to see him, of course. Trudeau recalls coming to a Stampede volunteer booth staffed by four people. The first three shook his hand. The fourth kept his arms crossed.

A senior Liberal (who also spoke to CBC News on the condition they not be named) said there was a sense internally that the government was not focusing on the right things last spring — in part because of unforeseen events like the convoy protests and war in Europe — and that it needed to get back to basics.

The core of the Liberal campaign in 2015 was a promise to deal with the economic concerns of the “middle class and those working hard to join it.” The Liberals weren’t saying much about such things in the spring of 2022. And Poilievre was at least giving voice to many Canadians’ frustration and anxiety, drawing crowds during the party leadership race that looked a lot like the ones Trudeau once drew to his town halls.

Sitting in his office in December, Trudeau pointed out that some experts viewed higher inflation in the medium term as the more optimistic scenario when COVID-19 sideswiped the global economy in 2020. He also cited all the other things the government could point to — a strong recovery in employment, a deficit and debt situation that still compares favourably with other G7 countries.

“But part of having been sort of cooped up with policy wonks, sending things out to help Canadians, is we weren’t able to have that contact that I had over the summer,” he said. “And over the summer, I really spent time connecting with Canadians again and saying, ‘OK, no, we’ve got to get back on these things that are facing them.’”

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken the summer and a trip outside Ottawa for Trudeau to realize that. But when he delivered public remarks at a Liberal caucus retreat in September, the change in tone was conspicuous. “A lot of people are concerned about the future and a lot of people are having a tough time right now,” he said.

Behind closed doors, cabinet and caucus were told to focus on four Cs: competence, confidence, contrast and campaign-readiness (in that order). The first two are the most important to Trudeau’s re-election chances: governing well could boost Canadians’ confidence in the government.

The emphasis on “contrast” is readily apparent — when Trudeau and his ministers speak these days, they almost always offer some comment on what Poilievre would or might do differently. Conservatives might interpret that reaction as fear. Liberals might hope those differences serve to motivate progressive voters and inspire the troops; a senior Liberal said Poilievre’s election as Conservative leader has inspired a number of former government staff members and volunteers to ask about getting involved again.

Based on Trudeau’s comments, the fourth C isn’t meant to suggest the Liberals want an election sooner rather than later. An election in 2025, when the Liberal-NDP deal is set to expire, is “a very, very solid assumption,” Trudeau said.

That’s not entirely his decision to make. But the Liberals may need all that time to ride out an economic slowdown and build a record of new achievements they can run on after a decade in office.

Another part of that 2015 speech in Brampton resonates now.

“After 10 long years in power, it’s like they’ve stopped trying,” Trudeau said, noting that the prime minister was seeking a fourth term in power.

“It’s like a bad movie franchise. By the time you get to the third or fourth sequel, most of the stars are gone and the plot is getting pretty thin.”

It’s not hard to imagine Poilievre repeating that attack, almost verbatim, in 2025.

Reminded of these comments in December, Trudeau said he stands by his words. “One of the challenges around Mr. Harper is that he got elected with five priorities and knocked them off and, OK, what else do you do?” he said. “When you’re just trying to manage things and just get through and incrementally change the country to be a little more conservative, it’s hard to get … that new energy.”

When Trudeau met with his cabinet in Vancouver back in September, he privately stated his desire to lead the Liberal Party into the next election. Publicly, he has never suggested otherwise. But there were rumblings about some potential successors getting ready to run, just in case. His comments in Vancouver seem to have pushed those rumblings to the background.

Trudeau recalled that he was 13 years old when his father left politics and said he wants to be sure he’s spending enough time with his wife Sophie Gregoire and three kids (now eight, 13 and 15). He also said that while he prides himself on being open to all possibilities and counter-arguments, there was never a moment when he thought he wouldn’t continue to lead the party.

Still, if the Liberals had lost that byelection in December, questions about Trudeau’s future would have come rushing back. And 2025 is a long way off. If Trudeau’s position or that of his government worsens — if Trudeau’s personal approval numbers continue to erode, if the Conservative Party takes and holds a significant lead in national polling, if there is another scandal — the decision could be taken out of his hands.

One advantage Trudeau may have over Harper is in his opponent. Seven years ago, Harper was up against Trudeau, who was viewed positively by 44 per cent of Canadians and negatively by 30 per cent, according to polling at the time by Abacus. In December, Poilievre was seen positively by 29 per cent and negatively by 34 per cent of poll respondents.

There is a theory about Trudeau — that he’s most prone to making mistakes when he’s doing well and is at his best when he’s trailing. He has had to effectively come from behind to win in each of the last three elections. But Trudeau — a politician blessed with several natural advantages — has put himself in those unfortunate positions. In 2021, the Liberals entered the campaign — a campaign they launched — with a lead, then frittered it away to a point where the Conservatives were briefly on track to win.

At the same time, the Liberal Party’s margin for error has dwindled. Over the last three elections, the Liberal vote has dropped from 6.9 million to six million to 5.6 million.

Misgivings about Poilievre might be enough to allow Trudeau to squeeze out another win. But the Liberals would have a better chance of re-election if they also had a positive argument to make for themselves.

Trudeau’s read of the 2015 election is that it was about seizing opportunity in a changing world and making Canadians feel confident about the future. That might seem hard to reconcile now with polling that shows only 30 per cent of Canadians think the country is on the right track. (Recent election results in the United States suggest that right track/wrong track polling is not necessarily a simple judgment on the incumbent government.) But it segues neatly into what excites Trudeau now.

It wasn’t just Calgary’s hospitality that Trudeau credited for his current energy. It was also his trips to Sorel-Tracy, Que. to announce funding for a plant that produces critical materials used in electric cars and batteries; to Hamilton, Ont. to commit funding for a plant that produces “green” steel; to Stephenville, Nfld. to sign a deal with Germany on hydrogen exports: and to Ingersoll, Ont. to celebrate the launch of the first full-scale electric vehicle plant in Canada. Trudeau now talks about third-generation steelworkers who can see a future for seventh- or eighth-generation steelworkers.

He’s framed this as the culmination of many things, including his government putting a price on carbon emissions and a new global hunger for reliable supplies of energy and resources from open, democratic countries. “It’s all coming together,” Trudeau said. In a speech to Liberal MPs in December, he vowed that “Canada will become the clean energy and technology supplier a net-zero world will need.”

That’s an idea Trudeau could put up against Poilievre’s notion of a broken country. But what if Canadians are simply tired of Trudeau?

In December, Trudeau said that if the government does its work well — “which we’re very much focused on” — the decision facing Canadians will be less about him and more about two very different visions of the country. It’ll be about whether Canada continues to fight climate change, trust science, pursue reconciliation, counter racism and invest in things like child care, Trudeau argued.

As Arnold points out, there is a block of voters who simply don’t like the prime minister. According to polling from the Angus Reid Institute, 91 per cent of Conservatives disapprove of Trudeau’s performance. But other voters remain persuadable — the same poll found that 55 per cent of NDP voters still approve of Trudeau. (Eighty-three per cent of Liberal voters approve of Trudeau.)

Without saying the Conservative leader’s name, Trudeau framed the alternative in terms of populism, tearing things down, “trickle-down” economics and a longing for an idealized past of old-fashioned values. The name “Trump” came up at one point.

(Pierre Poilievre’s office did not respond to CBC’s request for an interview.)

It remains to be seen what exactly Poilievre will run on in the next election. But if Trudeau’s time in office began in opposition to Harperism and then became about responding to the rise of populism, it’s perhaps fitting that Trudeau should face someone like Poilievre, a loud populist and an ideological conservative.

“The world has changed. The question is, who’s got the best idea of how to make sure that all Canadians can benefit from it?” Trudeau said. “That’s not about personalities. That’s about vision and ability to deliver the future that Canadians need.”

Vision and delivery are two different things, of course. Does that mean the next few years will be a put-up-or-shut-up moment for Trudeau, his government and his agenda?

“I wouldn’t phrase it that way, but I would go back to the very first frame I put out, which is people,” he said. “People will lose trust in their institutions if their institutions can’t deliver for them.”

Trudeau said Canada will need strong and trusted public institutions to succeed in the years ahead. But if Poilievre intends to argue that everything is broken, the Liberals have an obvious interest in minimizing the number of things that seem in need of fixing. If Trudeau’s opponent is arguing that a marked turn towards conservatism is required to fix the country, a progressive prime minister’s best response would be to govern well and effectively.

If the Trudeau government seems unable to meet the moment — if demand for food banks remains high or the dream of home ownership remains unattainable for too many — it will be a lot easier for Poilievre to argue that it’s time for a different kind of “better.” And if Poilievre can make the case that Trudeau has failed — on the economy, or the environment, or reconciliation — it will be that much easier for the Conservative leader to move the federal government in a very different direction.

Miller said he doesn’t think Poilievre is what’s motivating Trudeau. But perhaps Poilievre’s arrival has helped to clarify the stakes for Trudeau.

Regardless, Miller said, “there is a sense of unfinished business” within the government. That’s something Trudeau apparently has said behind closed doors — that he’s “not finished.” And his government does have a lot left to do, beyond those two billion trees.

The Liberal-NDP deal includes more than two dozen bullet points, most of them yet to be realized. The prime minister and the premiers are still in the posturing stage of negotiations over what should be a one-in-a-generation opportunity to stabilize and improve public health care. The employment insurance system is still in desperate need of reform. Significant pieces of the government’s climate agenda could be finalized this year. And all of that will play out against the backdrop of what is expected to be an economic slowdown over the next year.

“To have people feel that there’s a track we’re on that is going in the right direction, that requires us to continue to choose a positive vision for the country, that’s what this is about. And that’s the thing that drives me …” Trudeau said.

Poilievre surely would argue that his vision is a positive one, too. But Trudeau also contrasted himself with his father — who, in his words, thought about his “place in history” primarily in terms of repatriating the Constitution and enshrining the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The question, Trudeau said, is whether his government can “lock in what Canada is doing as an open, progressive, confident democracy” that has resources the world needs and brings in people from everywhere.

“Not that we have the best idea, but that we have really positive ideas that can help the world … All those things that Canada’s done so well are more important than ever on the world stage,” he said.

Those words “lock in” suggest someone who is thinking about a legacy. When this was pointed out, Trudeau backpedaled a bit and said “lock in” sounds a “little aggressive.” But is he worried about a Poilievre government coming to office in 2025 and reversing a lot of what his government has done?

Trudeau said he thinks that “a lot” of what he’s done is “aligned with the way the world needs to be going anyway. So it’d be more like losing time, losing ground as opposed to actually having things reversed.” A Conservative government might scrap the carbon tax, he said, but some future government would only have to bring it back. Ideally, Trudeau said, a country has a natural political cycle of turning slightly to the left and then slightly back to the right, but with a sense of forward movement. He predicted the Conservative Party will make one more attempt at running against the government’s climate policy and the Liberal notion of “inclusive economic growth.”

“And then finally they’ll perhaps figure out that maybe there’s a direction Canada’s going in that we can tweak” but is not reversible, he said.

Then he slipped back into talking about legacy.

“I don’t expect that when the dust settles and I’m a paragraph in some history book, 30 years from now, people are going to be able to point [to the equivalent of] multiculturalism or the [Charter of Rights and Freedoms] as the big legacies or the big consequence,” he said.

“But for me ... my dad was a professor, I’m a teacher. There’s a difference there, right? Where it’s about empowering and building processes that extend forward in the right direction. I mean, a good teacher sets their students up so that the next year, when they move on from them, they’re able to build and move forward on that success.”

Trudeau said the impact his father had on people wasn’t simply about the Charter of Rights, but was rather about “how they felt about the country.”

“Giving Canadians a sense of optimism and purpose … in a very complicated and messy world — that’s something that affects Canadians and how we see and how we raise our kids and how we build a future for them and how we create our communities,” he said.

“That’s ultimately what matters in this office. So I don’t think about the legacy pieces. I think about how do we make sure that Canada has momentum in the right direction, that’s going to leave the 21st century as being Canada’s century.”

As he did with his “sunny ways” catchphrase of 2015, this is Trudeau again drawing inspiration from Wilfrid Laurier. In 1904, Laurier told an audience at Massey Hall in Toronto that the 20th century would belong to Canada.

Trudeau also is likely aware that Poilievre has tried to claim Laurier as his own, at least insofar as Laurier once said that “freedom” was Canada’s nationality. And perhaps that makes Trudeau, who possesses a competitive streak, just a little more eager to run in 2025.

But there is much more at stake now than ownership of Laurier’s legacy.