LONDON, ONT.—The bubble campaign begins.

As leader of the third party in the Commons, Liberal Justin Trudeau faces months of gruelling work if he’s to win his shot at power and has once again hit the road — moving on from London to Windsor to raise his party’s profile.

You’d think he’d want all the visibility and free airtime he could get.

Yet after an autumn sitting of Parliament dogged by questions about his opposition to the military mission in Iraq and suspension of two MPs accused of harassment, Trudeau appears to have adopted a classic frontrunner strategy — avoid risk while your opponents are on the hot seat.

Right now, in the Liberals’ view, the person in the hot seat is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who’s suddenly facing an uncertain economic landscape, sinking oil prices and a Canadian dollar that has tanked.

Harper, too, heads to southern Ontario on Thursday and will use St. Catharines to make his first public comments since a stunning drop in the Bank of Canada’s overnight lending rates for banks.

Even before the Bank of Canada surprised analysts with its more dismal economic forecast, Trudeau had launched a new, sharper line of attack on Harper’s political brand as the so-called “steady hand on the tiller” all while studiously ignoring NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, who has made his own expensive promises.

For months, Conservatives and the NDP have mocked Trudeau for not being up to the job, but Trudeau moved to deflect those attacks by turning the table.

He said it is Harper who has demonstrated “weak leadership and bad judgment” on the economy, by “pinning all his hopes on oil prices remaining high,” cancelling a trilateral summit — “an opportunity to meet with our important trading partners in the United States and Mexico to talk about how to bounce back in our economy” — and delaying the budget, a decision that Trudeau said shows a government that is “improvising” and failing to “project confidence towards Canadians about the state of our economy.”

Here in the hard-hit manufacturing belt in southwestern Ontario, where the Liberals held two days of closed-door meetings, the Liberal leader and his team took no chances.

Trudeau limited his exposure to media, repeated two or three carefully scripted answers to all questions on the economy and national security.

After Wednesday’s surprise interest rate drop, Trudeau refused to say what the government should do, or what he would do in an upcoming budget, or comment on whether Ottawa should continue to run a deficit in the short-term.

He gave no policy prescriptions other than a promise to reverse an expensive “$2-billion tax giveaway” to Canada’s wealthiest families who’d benefit from the Conservative government’s income-splitting plan.

A platform, Trudeau said, would have to wait until an election.

After repeatedly slamming the government for having no plan for “economic growth and job creation,” Trudeau quickly left, avoiding follow-up questions and calls for clarity.

Finance Minister Joe Oliver said Trudeau’s plan “advocates job-killing tax hikes” while the Conservative government pledges to “continue to take action to create jobs, balance the budget and make life more affordable for families and seniors.”

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Yet the Liberals are clearly exploring novel options, and Trudeau left it to MPs like finance critic Scott Brison to talk about some of those.

Brison said there are many innovative financing solutions to leverage the kind of infrastructure investment that the Liberals have been touting, including “partnerships” with global pension funds.

“Australia has invested $13 billion this year in infrastructure (with) federal money, but they’re building over $50 billion worth of infrastructure because they’re partnering with pension funds — in some cases Canadian pension funds.”

“All it takes is leadership,” said Brison, pointing to an announcement last week by Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt, the provincial pension-fund manager, and the Quebec government to fund two massive infrastructure projects as “one of the models that we ought to consider.”

“It helps if you have a prime minister that sits down and talks to premiers about these ideas on an ongoing basis.”

Still, at a retreat that was part economic policy boot camp, part campaign readiness briefing, the mood of MPs was cautious, optimistic, albeit decidedly muted.

The next sitting of Parliament resumes with no clear answer on the fate of the two suspended MPs — Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti. An outside human rights lawyer, Cynthia Petersen, has conducted interviews and has not yet delivered a fact-finding report to Trudeau’s “green-light” committee.

But the party is better prepared to counter the expected Conservative pre-writ advertising blitz over the coming months.

Liberal party fundraising director Stephen Bronfman raised more money for the war-chest in 2014 than in any other year in the past decade, about $15.7 million in all, though that number is still to be finalized. More than a third of total — $5.6 million — was raised in the last three months of the year alone.

A big year-end push to tap donors for small contributions in December saw some $3.7 million raised through all channels, with $1.8 million coming through email appeals, a party source said.

“It’s very encouraging,” said Dominic Leblanc. “There’s no doubt that we haven’t had such generous contributions for a generation. We are and we will be ready to fight an election whenever it comes.”

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