EDMONTON—Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are talking about the magic number of 170 — the seats needed to form a majority government — as they gear up for an election that could be less than a year away.

In a meeting with big Liberal donors in Edmonton on Monday night, and again in election-readiness sessions with MPs on Tuesday, Trudeau and his officials talked of fixing their sights on 170 seats — a strategy they’re calling the “path through 170.”

But they also are warning MPs and supporters that a majority government will be much harder for any party to achieve in 2015 — especially for a party that now has just 37 seats in the Commons.

A total of 338 seats will be up for grabs in 2015 — 30 more than the current House of Commons — and winning more than half of them, Trudeau’s advisers say, is a daunting challenge.

It is, however, a more ambitious goal than the old “two-election” scenario that Liberals were talking about after they were dumped to third place in the 2011 election, when they hoped to come back to power first by getting back into official Opposition in 2015 and government at some further point down the road.

Trudeau told reporters the Liberals are preparing for the possibility that Prime Minister Stephen Harper may call an election much earlier than October 2015, the legislated date for the next federal vote.

“Mr. Harper has not once followed his own fixed-election-date law in the setting of elections, so I think it’s only prudent to try and make sure that we’re going to be ready,” Trudeau told reporters.

This is the smallest summer-caucus meeting the Liberals have ever held, because it no longer includes Liberal senators, exiled from the official caucus by Trudeau earlier this year.

But the rooms are filled with party officials and even some future candidates from across the country, as Liberals kick their campaign machinery into a higher gear in advance of the 2015 vote.

The number 170, advisers say, is being raised as a way to focus Liberals’ attention on the need to build support right across the country, and not just in places where Liberals have traditionally been strong.

Trudeau told reporters that the Liberals have a lot of work to do to earn the trust of voters — regardless of the party’s buoyant poll numbers — and to overcome a general cynicism in the country about politics in general.

“We’re only sitting at 37 seats in the House of Commons and the momentum we see across the country right now is very much a reflection of how much we’ve rolled up our sleeves and focused on working on the ground in ridings across the country,” Trudeau said.

“We also know we have an awful lot of work to do.”

Trudeau has taken his party to Edmonton to show that the Liberals are taking the West seriously — and in the hope that the reverse will be true as well. On Monday night, Trudeau met privately with Edmonton business leaders and on Tuesday night, Liberals organized a big rally in a riverside park.

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Alberta is not generally seen as Liberal-friendly territory, and much of the antipathy to the party is traced back to Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, and his National Energy Program of the early 1980s.

But Trudeau said on Tuesday that the NEP is more a fixation of journalists or partisan rivals, and not of the Albertans he meets. “I think they’re running against the wrong Trudeau,” he said.

Trudeau also said he’s asking Albertans to look at whether Harper is really doing anything for the resource economy.

“For all Mr. Harper’s talk about the economy and natural resources, he’s been all hat and no cattle on pipelines. We are no closer to getting the two pipelines he’s been pushing, Keystone XL and Northern Gateway, past where we were on the very first day he was in office,” Trudeau said.

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