In politics, cynicism is the halfway point between hope and despair.

When Justin Trudeau was running to become prime minister, he said that cynicism — about the future, the fate of our kids, and most especially the political establishment — was a serious problem. Somehow, someone just had to win back the public’s faith in the system. Otherwise, we would become a society of malcontents, nay-sayers, and self-seekers divorced from any meaningful sense of community. The national myth for those people would be that the whole shooting match was rigged against them for the benefit of the few.

Sound familiar?

I thought then, and still do, that Trudeau was right. Former PM Stephen Harper tried to create a world premised on his own declarations. By nature, and to the extent that the system would permit him, he was a dictator who governed by personal fiat. Facts didn’t matter, his spin machine sounded like a rainforest full of mosquitoes buzzing night and day, and he served the elites he pretended to oppose.

If you doubt that, then you will have to explain why he ended up in Bohemian Grove with the richest and most powerful members of the Republican elite after he was thrown out of office — just as he had huddled with them in Montreal in the late 1990s before re-entering federal politics. He is and always has been a creature of Republican ideals and tactics.

Trudeau has lifted the country out of the state of national depression that the decade of Harper created. Canadians seem to believe that no matter what his shortcomings, Trudeau will never be as bad as Harper. In other words, the young man who has caught the eye of the international community, has succeeded as a salesman of hope. A year in, he is as popular as he was the day he got elected. Almost.

Part of this is due to the lingering odium attached to the Harper years. But much of Trudeau’s popularity he has generated himself. He is the man on the top of the wedding cake as politicians go — perfect for an age obsessed with youth, good looks and swagger. But Canadians were most impressed by Trudeau’s aura of personal integrity and his sales pitch — that he would deliver them from the Dark Ages of Tory rule, with its corrupt minions, snitch lines, and squash-the-bug approach to any opposition.

And in quite a big way, the new PM has done just that.

Scientists, for example, no longer need to strap on their muzzles before going to work as they did during Harper’s rule. (In fact, the federal government has even hired a few more of them.)

The cabinet has gender equality.

As promised, the prime minister withdrew Canadian fighter jets from Iraq and renewed the country’s commitment to peacekeeping.

The Liberals created a badly needed parliamentary oversight committee on national security to make the work of the hush-hush crowd at least a little more accountable.

Trudeau restored funding to the CBC that had been cut by the previous government and reopened veterans affairs centres closed to help Harper “balance” his budget.

The list goes on, to this government’s credit.

True, Trudeau’s deficit projections have been breathlessly out of whack, his middle-class tax break was not revenue neutral, and the Public Service Alliance of Canada may not be feeling the love quite the way it did on election day. But on any balanced analysis, the guy the other side said wasn’t ready for the bigs had a pretty impressive rookie year.

Whether it’s punches or pumpkin seeds, this guy can take it and dish it out.

Based on Trudeau’s first year in office, you might think the PMO could put the whole operation on cruise control and enjoy the ride to 2019, especially with the CPC leadership race featuring a host of post-Harper pretenders, including the rejected and shameless Chris Alexander. But even with the Rat Line Twins in the running for Steve’s job, it would be a big mistake for the Butts Brigade to text while driving.

Part of what everyone is witnessing in the U.S. Presidential election is the extent to which “every day Americans” hate the political establishment with a passion once reserved for the country’s foreign enemies. So desperate have these people become, so overwhelming has been the avalanche of lies and betrayals visited on them by politicians of all stripes, that 50 million Americans are about to vote for a man whose preferred form of greeting women is a hearty grope.

Which is to say that for 38 per cent of the American electorate, cynicism has turned to despair. Never mind that Trump has dissed everyone from American war heroes to the Pope. Forget his lies, obfuscations, and inanities, and toss aside his cartoonish view of geopolitics: he is still preferable to millions of Americans than the professional liar class that rules in Washington — or at least he is to them.

And so, back to Justin Trudeau. The question is not whether he is loved. Clearly, he bathes in the public’s affection. The question is how deep does that love run? Or to put it in Trumpian terms, could he shoot somebody on the streets of Ottawa and get away with it?

On two foundational elements of the Liberal agenda — the environment and electoral reform, the answer appears to be no.

The prime minister found himself in a firestorm of criticism when he suggested in an interview with Le Devoir that he was backing away from his commitment to ending Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. The implication of his words was that his election had somehow fixed the problem, or made it far less urgent at very least. That sparked one commentator on social media to ask for a retraction of Trudeau’s words or his recall.

As NDP leader Tom Mulcair put it, “Justin Trudeau thought our electoral system was broken until it elected Justin Trudeau.”

Trudeau was supposed to be the antidote to years of Conservative mismanagement on the environment. At best, his record has been spotty, at worst, a betrayal of environmentalists who saw him as their champion.

While it is true Trudeau has finally put a price on carbon emissions, it is also true that he supported the Site C dam project in British Columbia, despite the opposition of environmentalists, First Nations leaders, Amnesty International, and the Royal Society of Canada.

The Trudeau government has also failed to legislate its own moratorium on oil-tanker traffic on the North Coast of the province. Instead, it has given conditional approval to Pacific NorthWest LNG’s massive $39-billion project that will also create five million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually should it ever be built. Not exactly what the summiteers in Paris had in mind — nor a lot of voters in British Columbia who went Liberal.

It comes down to keeping your word. When you don’t, the love doesn’t go very deep these days. In the dark alchemy of power politics, that is how hope is turned into cynicism, and Camelot goes up in a puff of words.