Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on a bit of a greatest-hits tour this week, playing at all the venues that put him over the top just a year ago.

Sitting down with Syrian refugees on Monday, talking to indigenous chiefs on Tuesday, a first ministers’ meeting at the end of the week — all reminders, in case you’re missing the hints, that Trudeau came to power by promising to be everything that Stephen Harper was not.

But there comes a time in every prime minister’s tenure when Canadians stop measuring the new guy against the old government. We’ve probably reached that moment with Trudeau — time to stop wondering how this PM will change power, time to start asking how power is going to change him. If you’re looking for the big political question of 2017, that’s it, in a nutshell.

Trudeau’s biggest political problems right now amount to a Triple-E threat: the economy, the environment and, of course, electoral reform.

On each of the Es, Trudeau isn’t being tested now on how he stacks up against Harper. Rather, he’s being challenged to reconcile his pre-prime-minister self with the reality of governing. It’s not Trudeau versus Harper anymore: It’s old Trudeau versus new Trudeau.

The budget deficit is a lot bigger and more enduring than the Liberals promised it would be. The government’s approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline has prompted cries of betrayal from old environmental allies. As for electoral reform … well, it’s been a very bad couple of weeks.

The flood of ridicule that greeted the mydemocracy.ca survey may well have been the nail in the coffin for Trudeau’s promised changes to Canada’s voting system. And if this happens, take it as confirmation that Trudeau — the 2017 version — is definitely no longer the man who came to power in 2015.

A word about that now-notorious survey, dissenting mildly from the emerging consensus: I’m not one of the people who joined in the chorus of mockery (though I’ll admit some of the reactions were hilarious). I filled out the survey (turns out I’m an “innovator,” if anyone’s keeping score) and found I actually could make some sense of what it was trying to accomplish.

All political leaders eventually have to handle the collision between pie-in-the-sky promises and the reality of government. Almost inevitably, they become a little more cynical — and in the process, so do voters. All political leaders eventually have to handle the collision between pie-in-the-sky promises and the reality of government. Almost inevitably, they become a little more cynical — and in the process, so do voters.

The survey, it seemed to me, was trying to find a way to sort Canadians into categories other than those affiliated with the entrenched positions of political parties or interest groups. Not a bad idea; traditional, party-preference polls are almost useless these days (I’m sure you’ve noticed). Very few Canadians belong to political parties or vested-interest associations; they make up their minds on the basis of their own values, not on what politicians or pundits on TV tell them to think.

The mydemocracy.ca survey, for all its alleged ham-handedness, is not unlike the tools that all political parties have been using to sort Canadians into likely and unlikely supporters, for storage in those burgeoning databases. Conservatives, New Democrats and Liberals have been building those databases over the past decade through quizzes and questionnaires, with equally puzzling or cryptic questions, as anyone on those parties’ email subscription lists can tell you.

And since those party databases have proven to be more useful than simple polls in predicting how citizens will vote and act, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Trudeau Liberals — fervent advocates of big-data politics — tried to find a way to get their heads around electoral reform with surveys and algorithms.

(Trudeau also paid a call this week on Shopify headquarters in Ottawa, to encourage young people to get into computer science and coding. Coincidence? Probably not.)

All this is to say that it’s entirely possible to see the release of the mydemocracy.ca survey as in keeping with the theme of the week: Trudeau trying to keep Trudeau connected to what worked for him a year ago. When politicians get into tough times, this is what they do — they try to shore up the base (or what they see as the base) of their power.

But nothing is as easy for Trudeau at the end of this year as it was a year ago. The Syrian refugees the prime minister met with on Monday needed more than a winter coat or a hug — they had pointed questions for him about their future lives and careers in Canada. Many of the indigenous leaders Trudeau is encountering this week are angry about his announcement on pipelines and won’t be content with mere words about ‘reconciliation’.

The first ministers, meanwhile, are long over the novelty of being asked to sit down with the PM as a group, and now they’re seeking real action on health care financing.

All political leaders eventually have to handle the collision between pie-in-the-sky promises and the reality of government. Almost inevitably, they become a little more cynical — and in the process, so do voters.

We can be reasonably certain that all those people on Trudeau’s event schedule this week have adjusted their view of the PM, for better or worse, in the past year. The big question, though, is how Trudeau himself has been changed by power — and how he’s connecting the politician he was a year ago with the one he is this week.

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