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The tour will involve three or four stops a day, for six or seven days over the next three weeks before Parliament goes back to work at the end of the month.

Golly. Another opportunity for the prime minister to display his fearsome cheeriness in a setting of polite Canadians who can be counted on demonstrate their pleasure at the chance to pose with the man and be treated like they count. If nothing else, it will certainly represent a change from the debilitating image that was beginning to take hold, of a party busy clinking champagne glasses with foreign billionaires while discussing development projects and the price of the latest statue of the prime minister’s father.

Unlike those ill-odoured fundraisers — which the Liberals continue to insist are entirely on the up-and-up, despite all the money changing hands — Trudeau’s encounters with “ordinary” Canadians are to take place in the sort of mundane settings in which Ottawa presumes regular Canadians spend their days. Here’s betting there won’t be many Montreal mansions or waterfront Vancouver estates on the itinerary. In Ottawa’s mind, Canadians pass their winters huddled against the cold, slurping coffee and scarfing donuts in neighbourhood hideaways while discussing the sort of workaday matters that are evidently such a mystery to members of the federal leadership.

What better setting to inject an impromptu visit by the prime minister? He intends to get the ball rolling by cruising down Highway 401 to London, Ont. — according to popular lore, one of Canada’s most average towns — where he will presumably appear at some local gathering spot for a wholly unscripted conversation with a random selection of commonplace townfolk, who will be expected to interrupt their chats about weather and their kids’ latest school antics to converse intelligently with the prime minister about matters of national import.