MONTREAL—Connect the dots between the widespread Liberal dissent over the approval of Alberta’s Teck Frontier oilsands mine, the Indigenous unrest that has paralyzed the country’s rail system this week and Canada’s uphill campaign to secure a temporary seat on the UN’s Security Council and what you find is a prime minister whose moral authority is increasingly depleted.

Justin Trudeau’s reduced circumstances extend beyond his failure to secure a second governing majority last fall. At this juncture, the flames the government are scrambling to extinguish or to control are not ones fanned by an opposition.

If anything, the current state of the opposition — with two of the four parties leaderless and a third staring at dismally empty coffers — may be one of the rare good things the prime minister has going for him these days.

Trudeau may have walked on water after his upset 2015 victory but going forward — at home and abroad — he is as likely to be rowing in gravel as to have the wind of public opinion and international appreciation at his back.

Take this week’s whirlwind African tour. Time will tell whether it made a positive difference to Canada’s quest for a Security Council seat. Or, for that matter, whether it offset the damage done to Trudeau’s brand by the surfacing, last fall, of his brown-faced pictures.

The tour’s impact would certainly have been greater had the UN campaign taken place earlier, at a time when the prime minister enjoyed rock star status internationally.

By now, that status has largely been brought back to the more normal size attendant to the government leader of a second-tier power.

That same applies to Trudeau’s capacity to act forcefully on the domestic stage.

The prime minister and his inner circle were reportedly taken aback last week by a vocal caucus pushback against the approval of Alberta’s Teck Frontier oilsands mine.

With the cabinet scheduled to deliver a decision before the end of the month, Liberal MPs from every region of the country — including some senior ministers — lined up to urge Trudeau to veto the project. News of the behind-closed-door backlash promptly leaked out.

The days when the prime minister could present his caucus with a controversial fait accompli of the magnitude of the purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline are clearly behind him.

The post-2019 Trudeau is no longer the leader whose coattails his MPs rode to the government benches.

Absent a second pro-Trudeau wave to lift their boats last fall and with the Trans Mountain decision weighing them down, many Liberal MPs struggled to keep their heads above water.

More than a few believe a green light to the Frontier mine would sink both the environmental credibility of the government and their re-election prospects.

Charlottetown MP Sean Casey is one of a handful of Liberal MPs who went public with his conviction that approving Teck Frontier would be inconsistent with the government’s climate-change strategy.

In his province of Prince Edward Island, the Green party has risen to official opposition in the legislature. Federally, the party most identified with environmental issues is becoming a force to reckon with across Atlantic Canada.

This weekend, Trudeau is coming home to a volatile nationwide Indigenous protest movement fuelled by opposition to British Columbia’s Coastal Link pipeline project.

Among provincial governments, none has been as engaged on Indigenous issues as that of B.C. Premier John Horgan.

Trudeau has put more political capital on the line on Indigenous reconciliation than any of his predecessors

They may yet find a face-saving way for the parties to the dispute to stand down.

But a hardening of public opinion on both sides of the reconciliation issue stands to be a lasting result of the events of the past week — with Trudeau and his pro-Indigenous agenda caught in the crossfire.

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On his way to power in 2015 the prime minister presented voters with the elements of a grand bargain.

He argued that the implementation of a more robust climate-change policy would lead to greater social acceptability for projects close to the heart of the fossil-fuel producing provinces.

Indigenous reconciliation was an essential part of the Liberal policy that was supposed to keep Canada on a viable energy/environment track.

So far, the opposite is happening.

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. She can be reached at: chantalh28@gmail.com . Or follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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