Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Two Years In: A Review

Has it really been two years since the 2015 federal election? Incredible. Time really flies when you're having fun.

Certainly Justin Trudeau seemed to be having a fair bit of fun for a while. It was sunny days and fawning press coverage and organic shirtless summer photo-ops all the livelong day. It worked out in his favour—his rookie caucus needed some time to learn the ropes and his opposition happened to be headless. You can't really blame the guy for spending so much time doing victory laps.

Remember the honeymoon phase? That genuine sense of hope for #RealChange after the darkness of the Harper decade? How we lived in that tiny utopian window where it seemed like the Liberal Party of Canada had turned a real progressive corner? That they hadn't just cynically deployed left-liberal language as a trick to lure kids away from the NDP, but would actually take things like electoral reform and reconciliation seriously? What a wonderful dream.

Sorry, I'm being glib. The Liberals have actually done quite a few things, even if the gap between rhetoric and reality continues open up like a crack in the West Antarctic ice sheet. Paul Wells documents a few of their greatest hits here: new infrastructure developments, promising growth in the Canadian tech sector, a new childcare benefit, assisted dying legislation, a mental healthcare transfer to the provinces, and some acknowledgement that the country's opioid crisis actually is a crisis.

Count your blessings; it could always be worse. We could be the United States, or the United Kingdom, or one of the many countries they have recently broken.

But the honeymoon is over, and it's not clear how much hard work the Trudeau Liberals can put into governing. Certainly quite a few of his newly-minted ministers have fucked the dog on their portfolios, most recently Finance Minister (and amateur French viscount) William "Panama Papers" Morneau.

But the battle lines in the House of Commons have also been redrawn since 2015, too. Both the Conservatives and NDP have new leaders that look like they could give the prime minister a run for his money. Jagmeet Singh seems like he was designed in a laboratory to be more Trudeau than Trudeau, the Dipper's secret weapon in the Instagram war for Ontario's suburbs. Meanwhile, Andrew Scheer seems shrewd enough to outflank them both on the fracturing social battlefield of Anglo North America.

The world, too, has changed quite a bit since autumn 2015. In retrospect it might be less that Justin Trudeau was the herald of something new in politics than the very last scion of the old. The performatively woke but uncritically trade-happy brand of neoliberalism he represents is somewhat out of vogue in the world today, and the jury is still out on whether or not it will stage a comeback or tumble into history's dustbin.

Part of Trudeau's appeal both at home and abroad hinges in no small part on how good the man looks compared to Donald Trump. But by virtue of its size, geography and political disposition, Canada is doomed to swim in the American wake, and the waves stirred up by that Leviathan may prove to drown Justin Trudeau yet.

All the really fun stuff is coming down the pipeline over the next two years. (Or by rail, as it were, now that Energy East is officially kaput.) Marijuana legalization is still on track to happen in the next nine or so months, even though the mechanics remain a mystery to many of the provincial players involved. Canadian foreign policy remains largely inscrutable, the federal government is about to enforce a country-wide carbon tax, and literally no one knows whether or not the president of the United States is going to roll out of bed one morning and casually run NAFTA through a shredder on Twitter.

We're closer to the next election than we are to the last one, and it's time to pay the piper. The real question now is whether the Trudeau Liberals really have the political capital to afford it. Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.