Justin Trudeau is stuck in his own Rolling Stones moment

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There’s a weekend now ensconced in Liberal lore that happened in 2012, when Justin Trudeau was a second-term MP contemplating a run for the Liberal leadership. He had gotten beyond whispering about the idea with his closest advisers, Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, and gathered a broader group of friends and helpers – together with their families and his own – at some rented cottages in Mont Tremblant.

In his biography Common Ground, Mr. Trudeau talks about how they hashed out the future of the Liberal Party – including whether the bedraggled creature had a future – and what his campaign to lead it would look like. Mr. Trudeau presents the “final, and most important, decision” of his inner circle that weekend as a response to the misgiving all of them shared: What did it mean to haul another Trudeau out of storage?

“There were lots of Liberals for whom the primary positive attribute of my candidacy was nostalgia. My last name reminded them of the party’s glory days, not to mention their own,” he writes.

“There was no way I was going to run if my campaign was going to be the political equivalent of a reunion tour for an aging rock band. We could all find something more productive to do than engage in that kind of politics.”

The uplifting answer to this conundrum in the book is that he would run on the future, not the past.

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What’s a lot more interesting is the present reality: Mr. Trudeau is now the sole proprietor of his very own bedraggled Liberal Party of Canada, and he is that aging rock star. He has basically no choice but to play his biggest hits from back in the day, hope the contrast with his younger and more limber self isn’t too awkward and pray at least some of the audience will sing along.

He warmed up this week in front of the hometown crowd, addressing the Liberal caucus before the House of Commons returns on Monday.

This is a strange ritual that political parties enact about twice a year, when they allow reporters into their clubhouse for an infomercial masquerading as a private staff meeting. The purpose is both to psyche up the troops and to make it seem like the troops don’t need any encouragement because they are already very much psyched.

Accordingly, everyone applauded and hooted when Mr. Trudeau took to the lectern at the front of the room and again at appropriate intervals throughout his speech. But beneath the base level of enthusiasm required when the cameras are there, the room felt a bit flat – not bleak or desperate in the face of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives clocking double-digit polling leads for months, just the slight sag of a balloon that was inflated a week ago.

Mr. Trudeau was wearing his usual friendly-working-mode uniform of a blue dress shirt rolled up to the elbows. In his speech, he riffed through a roll call of backbench MPs, highlighting their work on Ukraine, protecting minority rights and gun control, as a way to draw contrasts with the Conservatives.

One backbencher who did not receive a shout-out was Newfoundland MP Ken McDonald. He told a reporter, in a story published the day before Mr. Trudeau spoke, that the party needed a leadership review and he was not persuaded that Justin Trudeau was the right man for the job and moment.

“Every leader, every party has a best-before date. Our best-before date is here,” he said. “So we either have to change things up in a way to make people think we’re new again, or we’re able to do better going forward.”

The following day, Mr. McDonald issued a statement that said, “The intent of my recent public comments was not to personally call for a leadership review, and I am not calling for one now.” He must have been visited in a dream by a not-angry-just-disappointed Katie Telford.

Back in the caucus room, Mr. Trudeau drew standing ovations when he talked about unequivocally defending Ukraine, along with the peaceful world order itself, and when he said the Canada Child Benefit had lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. He earned appreciative snickers when he said the Conservatives criticize dissenting views on the Middle East among the Liberals because Tories insist everyone agrees with “Dear Leader.”

But there were many moments when you could feel how profoundly the ground has shifted beneath Mr. Trudeau’s feet since 2015, when his arguments and values statements – all he has to fall back on now, with both his colleagues and the country at large – seemed fresh and real.

“As we build that prosperous future that everyone is looking for in this country, we have remembered that the economy is not numbers,” Mr. Trudeau said at one point, offering a conspiratorial half-smile, as though some fools believe such a thing, but of course the wise ones in that room knew better.

“The economy is people,” he finished, luxuriating in a slow, meaningful delivery. The line was obviously meant as a crescendo, but the applause took a moment too long to arrive.

At another point, he mailed in a postcard from 2015, telling his caucus that the focus on working “to strengthen the middle class and support those working hard to join it” was what kept everything on track through the upheaval of the past few years.

“We’re beginning to see and feel that turbulence decrease and the clear landing come into view,” Mr. Trudeau said. It was genuinely unclear whether he was talking about the Canadian economy or his government’s political fortunes.

Time comes for all of us eventually. One moment, you’re peering in from the wings with an appraising eye, vowing that you’ll never be the greying musician strumming the opening notes of a classic hit and waiting just half a beat too long for the crowd to respond.

And then one day, there you are.