Contrast one summer barbecue season with another and you’ll see just how much the Liberal Party of Canada has fallen.

Flashback to 2006, a heady time for Liberals. The Chretien-Martin squabbles were receding and the big guns were coming out to share their vision of party and country. It was a summer of optimism, high stakes and big ideas.

No two candidates inspired as much excitement from the chattering classes as Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae did. The narrative of the two former roommates, separated by the Atlantic for decades, but now face-to-face as they battle it out for the country’s top post, was the biggest intellectual turn-on the urban thinker types had encountered in years. Newspapers and magazines went giddily along for the ride.

Both had spent time with renowned Oxford professor Isaiah Berlin. One of Berlin’s most popular reads was The Hedgehog and the Fox, a comparison of two types of thinkers. A flexible “fox” mind darts about among many topics; a “hedgehog” mentally buckles down, mastering one thing. Writers couldn’t help themselves and just had to figure out which animal best described each man.

This high-brow business was fluff. It was an attempt for fishwrap journos to prove to Ignatieff that they were smart-smart like him. The Canadian inferiority complex manifests itself in Canadian writers by their insistence that they could write for the New Yorker ... if they wanted.

So that was the summer party circuit seven years ago that began a leadership race that has really only just ended. The carousel ride of Stephane Dion, Ignatieff and Rae is finally over. This summer? Well, there’s not even a race. The barbecue season is celebratory. Everything is locked in place. Polls show in 2015 the party may very well return to its natural governing position. All good then?

Hang on a second. If I may ask a simple question: Which one is Justin Trudeau? Fox or hedgehog?*

Aha! Better than any hilarious twitter meme, better than any microphone gaffe — the answer should be the ultimate gotcha moment to derail his bid for the throne. Except it won’t. The answer, of course, is that one should know better than to ask a question of Trudeau that presumes he is even in the same league as previous Liberal leaders.

Rigorous questions for Ignatieff. Great expectations of Rae. Actual debates about policy and, y’know, the whole “what direction would you take Canada” kinda stuff.

No one would ever pose questions they know Trudeau can’t handle. But rather than point this out, they dance around it. Polite society and its media mirror are in agreement that you don’t disturb the senseless Trudeau juggernaut. I’m not suggesting we put on airs and demand to hear Trudeau’s thoughts on Wittgenstein. If musing on British profs was flaky the first time, it’s certainly so the second time. While so much of the Ignatieff vs. Rae summer was intellectual posturing, at least there was a bar set and an expectation to meet it. And they exceeded it.

Whatever your thoughts on these two, they are undeniably worthy contenders for the top job. Trudeau is not.

I’m not one of those smart-smart writers, so I can’t offer an Archilochus fragment that brilliantly sums up the above. So let me instead go low-brow and suggest that this T.S. Eliot line describes the 2013 Liberal barbecue circuit: “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.”

(*Answer: Skunk)