OTTAWA—A full hour and 20 minutes into a town hall that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held in Regina, Sask. came one of those crystallizing moments.

Trudeau dismissed a heckler, turning to take what he said would be a “carbon tax” question.

It was, surprisingly, the first of the evening though Saskatchewan is leading the charge against what Trudeau and the Liberals long ago began calling a “carbon price” or “price on pollution.”

At the end of his long answer to Jason LeBlanc, an Estevan farmer who challenged Trudeau, the prime minister declared the ballot box question of 2019 is clear:

“The choice that folks will have in the next election comes down to: do you want to be part of not just fighting climate change but being part of creating the solutions and a stronger economy in the future? Or do you want to hide your head in the sand and pretend that there is no problem that we have to deal with?”

“I know unequivocally which path I’m choosing and that is what the Liberal Party of Canada will be demonstrating in the run-up to the next election.”

Now Trudeau is supremely confident of his ability to take the measure of a room and stickhandle these town halls. He’s the one who insists on doing them. Trudeau believes it gets him out of the Ottawa bubble, closer to people, able to tap into the zeitgeist.

It might be the former teacher in him who likes to engage with students. Or the boxer who likes to spar. Or the snowboarder who likes the adrenalin rush that comes with tipping over a ledge or popping tricks in front of a crowd.

In fact, Trudeau invited his political rivals to do the same: take unscripted questions in freewheeling settings. He all but dared them, actually.

But Trudeau’s framing of the ballot question, not to mention the suggestion that anyone who disagrees with his plan to tackle climate change is “hiding their head in the sand” is politically risky.

It leaves the Liberal leader little wiggle room if he wants to change the channel, let’s say, to make trust and leadership the central question for voters.

Right now, his main two political rivals for votes are Conservative leader Andrew Scheer and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. Both remain undefined in the eyes of voters, both have faced challenges of their leadership ability from within their own parties, and both have yet to put forward clear platforms on a range of issues.

Moreover, Trudeau’s remark leaves no real wiggle room if an economic recession materializes — as some suggest could come in the next year — to dial back his “carbon tax” or pivot to other measures, lest he be accused of hiding his own head in the sand.

It is also frames the election question exactly the way the Conservatives want it.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has already begun 2019 with a news conference vowing to fight a carbon tax every step of the way. He says Canadians are already anxious about their household budgets and “simply cannot afford this tax.”

And — even if none of those things matter — Trudeau’s positing of the choice as a ‘you’re either with us — or you’re a climate change denier’ is a tone-deaf, slightly arrogant not to mention bizarre thing to say.

Calling Canadians who disagree with him climate change deniers is neither prime ministerial nor tolerant.

It is a polarizing and divisive approach to a debate that — as Trudeau rightly says — will be a defining one of the next political year.

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To be fair, his questioner, Jason LeBlanc, didn’t mince his words either. He asked: “My question is why would you charge a carbon tax on something that is not even proven to be factual and taking money away out of our pockets for Canada?”

LeBlanc, 47, is an auctioneer and farmer who farms grain and cattle on more than 12,000 hectares in the middle of the oil patch near Estevan’s Westmoreland coal mine.

In an interview LeBlanc said he is a Conservative voter, but not a card-carrying member, and is a “climate change denier and I’m proud of it.”

He believes the droughts that Trudeau warned of are cyclical weather events the country has seen in the 1930s and 1980s; that flooding in Saskatchewan was the result of government mistakes in opening dam waters, and the Paris Agreement targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions will never be met. They will only harm the economy, says LeBlanc, and Trudeau’s focus on climate change is simply an effort to “downplay the fact that we’re broke.”

So Trudeau was never going to persuade LeBlanc.

But he does need to persuade many other Canadians, and his cause isn’t furthered by insulting skeptics of his policy choices as climate change deniers.

It wasn’t, by the way, the only time Trudeau turned aside a questioner in a way that delights his critics. A female university student who said she works part-time in the oil sands asked the prime minister to explain his recent comments about the gender and social impacts of an influx of male construction workers in rural areas — comments that Conservatives have slammed but others have tried to explain for him.

Instead of a direct answer, Trudeau gave her a polite but brief non-responsive reply, drawing boos from several in the audience. This, after giving lengthy and substantive replies to all kinds of questions that night — including a rebuttal of outlandish conspiracy theories about CSIS putting cameras in Canadians’ bedrooms, the country being flooded with immigrants who want to kill Canadians, sharia law and more.

For a leader who says he welcomes respectful engagement and dialogue with Canadians, it was a less than respectful dodge.

By Friday, Trudeau’s non-answer was picked up by Ontario Proud — a right-wing political advocacy group — and promoted on Twitter.

Correction — January 18, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Jason LeBlanc farms grain and cattle on more than 12,000 hectares in the middle of the oil sands near Estevan’s Westmoreland coal mine. In fact, the area near Estevan's Westmoreland coal mine is an oil patch, not, an oil sand.

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