Justin Trudeau is still prime minister, but mixed with relief for the ruling Liberals will be the knowledge that his job will have to fundamentally change in his second term.

The election has been bruising, the past year has been humbling, and the election has exposed new fissures in the federation. Moreover, taking on the job as a minority prime minister will call upon entirely different skills than Trudeau has exhibited so far as a leader.

Just last week, Trudeau acknowledged he has a rebuilding job to do in this country, when he was asked about regrets in his first term in office.

“We find ourselves more polarized, more divided in this election than in 2015. I wonder how, or if, I could have made sure we were pulling Canadians together?” he said.

The work starts in Ottawa — not a place where this politician, born at 24 Sussex Dr., has ever seemed to feel at home. But Trudeau is going to have to learn to tolerate the House of Commons in a way he hasn’t displayed before, either in opposition or in government.

The power he now holds rests in a minority chamber, where every vote could matter. Trudeau cannot count on getting his way, either on big budgets or the smallest bills.

Minority prime ministers are far less free to travel the world on extended trips or even skip out of Ottawa to do town-hall meetings around the country, as Trudeau has been so fond of doing.

Trudeau’s status as a global celebrity, well cultivated in his early years of being prime minister, is almost irrelevant in a job that requires him to pay minute detail to domestic issues. Put it this way: being on the cover of Vanity Fair will matter a lot less after the 2019 election than it did in 2015.

Trudeau will have to learn the art of making deals with his opponents in the chamber — some of the same characters he’s spent the past six weeks condemning as seriously wrong and misguided.

He’s going to have to forge a real relationship with New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh and other leaders on the progressive left. He’s going to have to keep an ever-watchful eye on the Conservatives, who will be looking for any chance to take the Liberals down.

And never mind his opponents — Trudeau will also have to learn how to make some deals with fellow Liberals. Minority prime ministers require deft arts of caucus management, to guard against potential floor-crossers or disgruntled MPs who could be persuaded to vote with the opposition.

As we learned during the SNC-Lavalin saga last winter, caucus management hasn’t always been Trudeau’s strong suit. Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott eventually took their leave from cabinet, then the Liberal caucus, after only a scant few conversations with Trudeau.

The long-running SNC-Lavalin saga also emboldened other MPs to grumble that Trudeau kept too much of a wall between his PMO and caucus. Stories emerged of MPs who had never had a one-on-one conversation with the PM. Walls like that don’t work in minority governments: Trudeau will have to seriously up his efforts — which to be fair, he did make in the wake of SNC-Lavalin — to stay in better touch with his Liberal MPs.

As one MP said to me earlier this year, in regard to complaints about the frosty or non-existent relations between caucus and PMO: “Whether we win a majority or a minority, it’s game on the day after the election.”

What’s more, the dynamics have changed.

Trudeau can expect to find himself leading a caucus that has more self-assurance, collectively and individually, than the last one. For the past 40 days, Liberal candidates have been going door to door, arguing Trudeau’s case for him in the face of many voters who felt, for any number of reasons, that he had disappointed them.

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The MPs who did win their seats on Monday night will not be feeling — to put it mildly — that they won on Trudeau’s coattails. They will feel that he owes them, rather than vice-versa.

Back in 2013, when Trudeau first assumed the leadership of the Liberals, the modest hope was for a two-election strategy. First they would jump back to opposition, then into power. By 2015, they were slightly more ambitious: first win minority government, then win a majority.

Somehow, the strategy seems to have worked in reverse: majority, now minority.

Trudeau is known for his ability to take lessons from setbacks. The learning will start on Tuesday, as he looks around and realizes he is not, and cannot be, the kind of prime minister he was from 2015 to 2019. But he is still prime minister. And after the past year, that is not a small thing.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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