Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau is popular. Why wouldn’t he be? But what makes some politicians attractive and others repellent?

Trudeau is intelligent, humane and self-confident, a Québécois who is devoted to Canadian unity and has the most marvellous family: a sophisticated career-minded wife, Sophie Grégoire, and three adorable young children with the interesting names that only confident parents bestow: Xavier James, Ella-Grace and Hadrien. He has an English degree from McGill, a UBC teaching degree and taught for several years. He has his father’s intellect and wit, while being more down to earth, and his mother’s good looks and warmth. And the guy, a Montrealer, can wear a suit.

Take every word over four letters in that paragraph and you have a list of why the ruling Conservatives hate him. I didn’t put the word “attractive” in there in case they fizzed with resentment and exploded, like when you shake a pop can and open its little metal hole.

If you’re reading this online, check out the gif of Justin and Sophie dancing in a hallway just before his big convention speech in 2013. This is how these two shake off their spare energy; they dance like nobody’s watching. But everyone’s watching and they like what they see.

Trudeau has brought the party back from near-extinction in 2011 to lead in the polls, and the NDP, admirable but too cautious, are worried. What do Stephen Harper and his wife do before a big moment? Glare at each other? He yells at a trembling staffer, she strokes her cats. At some point, a line was crossed and Harper now emits the kind of toxicity a politician can’t kill. It’s like a house where meth was cooked. That house is done.

When was that point? There’s a long list of Harper acts that offend Canadians’ intelligence and sense of fairness. Just this week, he refused an inquiry into Canada’s nearly 1,200 murdered and missing native women, calling it pure crime and not a “sociological phenomenon,” as relatives prepared murdered Tina Fontaine’s body for cremation. But it was demonizing scientists and killing the census that made people think of Harper as primitive. We are a rich organized country that admires counting skills.

Perhaps it was Harper’s dead sociopathic eyes or the way he campaigned with pre-selected audiences from behind a metal fence. No. It was when people started to think of his hair as a separate organ, like Dick Cheney’s heart which he basically kept in a pocket, a living pulsing thing that would halve, leap on you and clap both sides of your head if you poked it.

It’s like when the journalist Caitlin Moran called British Prime Minister David Cameron “a C-3PO made of ham.” After that, all bets were off. In 2010, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker said hated coalition leader Nick Clegg, “that agonized doe-eyed apologist,” was only 40 per cent human while Cameron was 100 per cent something else. “I see the sheen,” he wrote, “the electronic calm, those tiny expressionless eyes. I glimpse the outlines of the cloaking device and I instinctively recoil, like a baby tasting mould.”

Once you reach this point, even people who find Conservative keywords erotic —”F-35,” “immigrants,” “elite” “taxpayer dollars” and weirdly, “sipping” — look at Harper skeptically.

The recent break-in at Trudeau’s Ottawa house while he was away campaigning was another crucial moment. Normal people imagined the scene — a note left on a pile of large knives in the kitchen while Grégoire, a nanny, two children and a baby slept upstairs — and went ashen.

The tweets and comments were even more vile than usual, as if police hounds from Missouri were straining at a leash made of string. Envy went a-scampering. True Harperites talked sternly about training one’s wife to maintain the perimeter. Harper’s hair was talking.

I am deeply interested in the Harper phenomenon as a way of distracting myself from the Scut-Farkus-runs-the-schoolyard bullying of the past decade. Something un-good lurks. There’s a heart in my pocket and it isn’t mine. The call is coming from inside the house. I’m being suffocated by a toupée.

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And then . . . I look at Trudeau dancing with his wife, his ease with his fellow humans, his best wishes for his — and our — children, the feeling that I am back in a world of plausibility, sanity, arts and science, good cheer. I had a bad dream and next year it will be over.

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