“Pierre Poilievre’s populism, his slogans and buzzwords, are not serious solutions to the serious challenges we’re facing,” he said.

He made clear the battle grounds he wants to fight on: Abortion rights. The carbon tax and climate change. Public broadcasting and by extension language rights. Dental care.

Trudeau set off raucous applause from party faithful when he said conservative politicians “either say investing in Canadians is a waste of money or that our policies are too woke.”

“Too woke!? Hey, Pierre Poilievre, it’s time for you to wake up,” Trudeau said, in a marked departure from the tone he struck in his New York speech last week.

Introduced by Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Trudeau addressed a packed room of delegates at his Liberal Party’s biennial convention in the heart of downtown Ottawa — not at all like an American political convention, but a sort of pro-forma event where the backroom conversations typically matter more than what happens on the floor. But Trudeau gave them a call to action this time: fight the Big Bad.

Liberal organizers and partisans, the glue that holds the party together and the key to successful campaigning, are gathering there to reconnect and re-energize for the first time since the pandemic. And that may be crucial, because this convention may be their last before it’s back to the races.

Trudeau is facing pressure on a number of fronts. A public inquiry into allegations of meddling by China in recent Canadian elections. Inflation and a higher cost of living. A housing crisis. Rocky polling.

And Parliament itself is a tricky balancing act. His party struck a bargain with the left-wing NDP to shore up its position in Canada’s minority Parliament, but that means the Liberals are not in full control of the agenda or when the next election might land.

And when one does come, the governing party may step right into a “change” election — a much more hostile electoral environment with a strong desire for something fresh.

Trudeau will be seeking a fourth consecutive mandate to govern in the next election, which would be a rare feat for a Canadian prime minister. Few have ever won four in a row, with the last being Wilfrid Laurier more than a century ago.

Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, did manage to win four, but after a decade of governing his fourth re-election bid ended in failure, with a defeat by Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in 1979 before Trudeau staged a final comeback in 1980.

Justin Trudeau has been at the helm of the country for nearly eight years now, and according to University of Toronto Professor Emeritus Nelson Wiseman, that’s approaching the standard best-by date.

“The shelf life of prime ministers is usually about a decade,” he said.

This means Trudeau may yet decide to change his mind.

“He has to say that (he’s going to run), even though I think there’s an excellent chance he may leave. Because if you say you’re not going to stay, then all of a sudden there’s an open race. So, it’s not strategic,” Wiseman said. “Next year may very well be the year that Trudeau will decide, without an announcement, whether he’s going to hang around or not.”

Trudeau rattled through a list of things his party has done and recognized things are much harder for Canadians these days — the cost of living has gone up and the world is a less certain place.

But he did not address the elephant in the room: the mounting questions about Chinese electoral interference, and a newspaper report that government officials failed to alert an opposition politician that Chinese intelligence sought information to crack down on his family members overseas.

“That’s really (what’s) on the radar of Canadians and Liberals because they recognize this could be their Achilles’ heel,” Wiseman said.