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Trudeau, it seems, now agrees with them.

“I think the values and the themes that I was putting forward were very strong and very compelling but when you’re talking about values and themes at a high level, you’re not necessarily talking directly about, well, this community centre we just put specific money into building, or this program that helped hundreds of thousands of Canadians be lifted out of poverty,” he said.

While he does not plan to stop talking about values entirely, Trudeau said he wants to make sure they are talking more about the “concrete things” his government is doing to “make life better for Canadians.”

He also wants to share the spotlight with the “extraordinary team of ministers who weren’t always given the attention or visibility that we would all have benefited from.”

Photo by Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Refocusing on the team and on “tangible deliverables” is a way to counter populism, he added, “where people no longer feel that their institutions or their government are actually there to deliver for them.”

During the campaign, Trudeau said his biggest regret was that he’d become a polarizing figure. He got a graphic demonstration of that on election night, when voters shut out the Liberals in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the oil-producing provinces most impacted by Trudeau’s climate change and environmental policies.

In the interview, Trudeau said he believes that polarization is caused by anxiety over the transformation of the global economy due to climate change and advances in artificial intelligence and technology. He’s become a lightning rod for some of that anxiety, he posited, because he’s been “unabashed” in arguing that Canada needs to accept the transformation and invest in things like science to get in front of it and help shape it.

“I think I have become, in some ways because I am very much focused on positioning Canada for the long term, an easy element for people who say, ‘No, no, no, we can just keep the way we’ve been for a little while longer and we don’t need to disrupt everything yet and we can hunker down and hope that all this will blow over,”‘ he said.

“For people for whom the future is fraught with anxiety, it becomes easy to sort of point to me and say I’m trying to accelerate things rather than trying to make sure that we are going to be successful over the coming century and not just over the coming couple of years.”