His job is to govern, not run for election. Politics usually refers more the latter than the former.

Trudeau's moment, really, was when he didn't seem to think it was his job to do anything about housing or inflation.

I don't think you can pin the LPC's fall on that, but just coincidentally that's when the bottom fell out of their numbers and they scrambled off to a retreat to try and figure out how to get people to like them. Unfortunately, all of the solutions would require them to abandon neoliberalism.

I think they're really hoping for the kind of moment that got Keir Starmer in, or that saved Macron's bacon. Centrist and centre-left parties really, really want it to be the late 90s again, when you could lower taxes, be entertained by billionaires, play the sax on stage, fingerbang an intern and still be thought of as cool and progressive because you inhaled pot smoke one time.

Unfortunatey, it's very difficult to actually decide what an election will be based on. You usually try and figure that out by polling the electorate and framing your election campaign in its terms, in a form of political judo.

This is going to be a cost-of-living election. Milhouse is just trying to turn that into an anti-tax thing.

As much as both you and Poilievre would welcome a carbon tax election (for opposite reasons), neither of you are gonna actually get it until people can house and feed themselves reasonably.