What’s floating around between Justin Trudeau’s ears right now

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Basically all the chatter in Ottawa at the moment reflects some desire to can-opener the top of Justin Trudeau’s skull and peer into his brain: Will he step down? Does he know he’s toast? What does he think will happen next?

All of those answers live in the Prime Minister’s head and only in his head, and that often feels like a you-can’t-get-there-from-here problem. To be fair to Mr. Trudeau, the blunt questions the media bark at him don’t really invite introspective sharing. And to be fair to the question barkers, Mr. Trudeau’s communication style means his answers usually don’t offer much more enlightenment than a Magic 8 Ball.

But usefully, he just sat down for an hour-long chat with Nate Erskine-Smith, his most cheerfully rebellious MP and host of the Uncommons podcast, for a conversation that was genial but not all kid gloves.

Listening to a skilled politician explain things on their own terms can be a dangerous exercise in gullibility. But when all of the biggest political questions hinge on what one man is thinking, if he holds out a pair of eyeglasses that reveal how he sees the world, it’s useful to take a peek.

Mr. Erskine-Smith started out probing why Mr. Trudeau wants to run again, why he believes he’s still the best guy for the job and the doubts that have surfaced from certain corners of the Liberal universe.

“First of all, let’s look at people who are saying, ‘Oh, I’m not sure,’” Mr. Trudeau said. “Would they be saying that if I was 10 points ahead in the polls right now?”

On one level, this is absurd, like asking whether someone would be accusing you of hitting a deer with your car if there wasn’t that carcass on the road 15 feet in front of your smashed bumper.

But what Mr. Trudeau said next explained what he was trying to get at, and it was a more subtle point. He asked Mr. Erskine-Smith, rhetorically, whether there are a lot of Liberals saying he doesn’t have the right priorities or shouldn’t be battling for the environment, the economy or women’s rights. In this line of thinking, people are fretting solely because of polling results and not anything inherent to him.

At another point, Mr. Erskine-Smith mentioned a senior he met at a Legion, who told him he didn’t like his boss – “too much spending, too many apologies” – but would vote for him anyway, because he knew what he was getting and that was more than he could say for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Mr. Trudeau seized on that.

“There was something really, really telling, in that someone may disagree with me about this or that or the other thing, but they know the frame that I’m coming from, they know what drives me, they know what matters to me,” he said.

Then Mr. Trudeau linked that deeply knowable quality to the oh-god-what-next world we’re living in, pointing out that no one asked him in 2019 how he was going to handle a global pandemic or Russia invading Ukraine.

“Whatever this next election is going to be about, I think the pattern of crises – economic, military or geopolitical or health – have not been something that was on the ballot or even discussed in the debate,” Mr. Trudeau said. “That idea of knowing someone’s values, knowing the frame with which they approach challenges, is not just important, it’s ultimately sort of the only thing.”

This set of ideas is illuminating. It suggests that Mr. Trudeau believes Canadians know what he stands for and – crucially – are aligned with it deep in their marrow, and when push comes to voting-booth shove, there will be a sort of homing instinct.

He also expressed light frustration with endless questions about what’s on offer in the next campaign, and specifically with the idea that it should be anything novel.

“The challenge is everyone’s like, ‘Okay, what’s the new vision?’” he said. He listed off what the Liberals have been fighting for all along in his eyes – “environment and economy, inclusion, progressive values, defence of individual rights” – and said all of those calling cards are not just still important but more important now (emphasis his).

“How we wrap that up into a compelling, ambitious vision that gets people out into the streets, to be a movement like we were in 2015, that is going to be tackling Pierre Poilievre with that same enthusiasm that we did nine years ago, that is the single-minded focus that I have over the next few months as a party leader,” Mr. Trudeau said.

This makes explicit what’s become clear gradually over the last year: that the Liberals are going to keep calm and carry on, rather than tacking this way or that in the face of low popularity. This argument of Mr. Trudeau’s floats free of the passage of time or the drift of public sentiment, believing that what once fuelled a movement could do so again in a fundamentally different moment.

At the very end of the conversation, Mr. Erskine-Smith said Mr. Trudeau has told him that he plays to his competition, and while that comment was about his pool game, it seems relevant now that everyone on the red team acknowledges that Mr. Poilievre is a better communicator than past Conservative leaders. Mr. Trudeau nodded.

“I want you to fight the fight, have the drive that you’ve got, and take it to Poilievre and turn things around. I think you’re capable of doing that, and I want you to give it your go,” Mr. Erskine-Smith said. He added, “It’s a timing question too: If we throw everything at the wall and it’s not working, then we also have to consider what’s in the best interest of the country and at that moment in time.”

The hardest thing to do in an interview is to ask a thorny question and then just sit and wait quietly for an answer. But this wasn’t exactly an interview, and so Mr. Erskine-Smith threw out that rather hefty thought, then thanked the Prime Minister for chatting and off they went.