By a wide margin, the biggest political event of the year ahead will be the federal election due to be called for next October.

On the evidence, this election is Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s to lose. In most respects he is the right person in the right place at the right time.

He’s a genuinely likeable individual. He’s made some verbal blunders but none of them rank as unforgivable mistakes. And topping that pair, he has the additional asset of having no policies.

At one time, this last among Trudeau’s attributes might have been considered a political handicap. Today, public skepticism about politicians is so deep and widespread — in surveys they rank ahead only of second-hand car salesmen — that the less they say the better for them provided they say it in an engaging, caring way.

During the actual election, Trudeau will of course have to say something. But he will have reduced to a minimum the time left for the Conservatives and New Democrats to expose flaws in the programs he proposes.

Canniness, thus, has been combined with niceness. That potent pairing transformed the political scene almost instantly when Trudeau first entered the contest for the Liberal leadership in October 2012. The Liberals, then a poor third, soared into first place in the polls. Ever since, Trudeau has kept the Liberals well ahead, although recent polls show that gap between them and the Conservative government has narrowed to a mere three or four percentage points.

So it’s largely already over but for the counting of the votes.

The odds do favour this result. Many more people like Trudeau than they like either of the alternatives, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair.

Add to this the cardinal fact that Mulcair, for reasons not easy to pin down because he’s highly intelligent, just hasn’t connected with the Canadian public.

Harper, though, has some assets of his own. His support, while smaller than Trudeau’s, is far better distributed. One expert I quizzed reckons that if each of them won the same number of votes, Harper would win 10 more seats.

More substantive, despite Harper’s lack of warmth and empathy, events may be making him a different kind of right person in the right place at the right time.

Bad economic news, in everything from shrinking oil prices to the spending cuts now being made by all governments, provincial and municipal as well as federal, threatens increases in unemployment and a widening of income gaps.

At such times, incumbent prime ministers almost always get punished severely. Voters, though, may judge that this is the time for a tough guy at the top.

The result thus may be closer than the omens seem to suggest. If so, it’s only after the elections that the real politicking will begin.

One possibility could be a Trudeau win by a minority. Another could be a Harper win, but again only by a minority.

In fact, the consequences of each of those guesstimates would be virtually identical. Provided that the seats held by the Liberals and NDP are larger when combined than those won by Harper, he soon would be out and Trudeau would be in.

Except for one thing. His father, Pierre, was once in the same position, winning the 1972 election but only just, because the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP had more seats when combined.

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Pierre Trudeau’s response was to implement every bit of legislation the New Democrats called for. As soon as the polls turned his way, though, Trudeau went out of his way to insult the New Democrats. He then arranged to lose a vote of confidence, called an election and won it with a thumping majority. NDPers have never forgiven that Trudeau for that exercise in cunning.

So, provided that my guesses are reasonably accurate, while the next election is going to be fascinating, wait until it’s ended for the real show to begin.

Richard Gwyn’s column appears every other Tuesday. gwynr@sympatico.ca

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