“I will tell you: there is no experience like stepping into this ring and measuring yourself . . . Not for your name, your fortune, your intelligence, your beauty, none of that f-----g matters.”

A few weeks ago, with those very words at a charity boxing event, Justin Trudeau got himself into a bit of trouble, as the Liberal leader often does when speaking off-script.

But the words also served as a fitting backdrop to the career anniversary that Trudeau marks on Monday — one year as Liberal leader. It’s been a year in which Trudeau has had a chance to measure himself, and for his friends and foes to take the measure of the leader too — his fame, his party’s fortunes, his intelligence and, yes, even his beauty.

So how has the past year treated Trudeau, and how has he changed the party?

Katie Telford, who ran Trudeau’s leadership campaign and is now co-chair of the next national election campaign for the Liberals, put out a video statement to members a few months ago, in which she warned supporters that the best way to measure progress is in cold, hard numbers.

Some of those numbers deliver heartening news. Since Trudeau won the leadership, the Liberals consistently place highest in the popularity polls. Membership numbers have recently passed the 100,000 mark — double the number after the crushing election defeat of 2011 — and are reportedly on track to reach 200,000 by the end of this year, according to Telford.

In 2013, for the first time in more than a decade, Liberals reported more donors than the ruling Conservatives. The “Trudeau effect” could also be seen in the all-important fundraising totals. In the first three months of 2013, before Trudeau took over, the Liberals raised just $1.7 million. By the end of the year, they had raised about $10 million more, posting a $11.6 million total for 2013, compared to $18 million for the Conservatives and $8 million for the NDP.

All those plus signs on the Liberals’ ledgers are no doubt a product of Trudeau’s hectic, even frenetic travel schedule. More numbers: As of Monday, Trudeau will have spent more than one-third of the past year on the road — 131 days in total, attending 487 events in 111 ridings and 105 towns and cities.

While all these numbers are expanding the Liberals’ coffers, membership rolls and, most significantly, their hopes — the Liberal world on Parliament Hill is actually a bit smaller. Trudeau has clearly decided that he can do more for the party on the road than in the House of Commons, and that he can do without the Senate altogether.

The party’s Wednesday caucus meetings are much smaller now, since Trudeau unexpectedly announced in January that he was cutting loose the 32 Liberal senators — that they were no longer an official part of his team. Instead of 70-plus people at the weekly meetings, there’s a lean, mean 35 MPs.

John McKay, a 17-year veteran MP for Scarborough-Guildwood, says Trudeau has “grown immeasurably” in managing the notoriously difficult-to-wrangle Liberal caucus.

“He’s way sharper than people give him credit for, I have to say that,” McKay says. Amid the competing noise of Liberal MPs trying to have their say, McKay says that Trudeau is able to “synthesize rather quickly and say ‘this is where we’re going,’ and get people going along, even the ones that disagree.”

McKay says Liberal MPs cannot help but notice that Trudeau has given a good swift kick to the machinery of the party, all once-dominating organization that fell into disrepair during years of Liberal complacency and infighting.

“He’s done a complete remake of the infrastructure of the party and is driving that remake, not only internal, head-office functions, but also into the ridings,” McKay says. Such attention to detail was not expected from some who had expected Trudeau to base his political strategy on his popular appeal — the battle of the airwaves.

“He can take care of the air game, but you need to have a good ground game and he’s driving that, and that’s stuff people don’t necessarily see,” McKay says.

But there have been unquestionable bumps along the way.

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In his acceptance speech last April 14 in Ottawa, Trudeau warned that Conservatives would spend a lot of time attacking him. And they have, in repeated and large ad campaigns, as well as in the Commons. Leaked Conservative strategy documents, obtained by the Star, revealed the ruling party is preoccupied with the dreaded prospect of Trudeau as prime minister after the 2015 election.

And Trudeau, alleged to be “just in over his head,” often has seemed to be handing the Conservatives ammunition for those attacks.

For instance, though Trudeau presents himself as more worldly and well-travelled than Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he also has seemed to talk himself into trouble when pronouncing on foreign affairs — chatting about “root causes” of terrorism, the efficiency of China’s democracy or joking that Russia would invade Ukraine over hockey grudges.

There was also the f-word at the recent boxing event. It’s not the first time he’s sworn in public and not the first time he said afterward that his wife, Sophie, had reprimanded him.

A day or so later, however, Trudeau gave CBC interviewer George Stroumboulopoulos an insight into why he tends to talk himself into trouble — it’s the product of a calculated gamble.

“All my life I had to know I was carrying the (Trudeau) name, people were paying more attention to what I had to say,” he said. “And I had to make a choice early on. Do I have a private, secret life or do I live fairly openly and consistently with the person I am?”

Trudeau said he’d decided to take the latter course.

“Everything I say is parsed and used as an attack ad if that’s the way someone wants to use politics. I have to decide: what’s more important? That I always say exactly the perfect right thing and it’s carefully scripted and controlled? Or do I try and trust that my values are the right ones and therefore are going to see me through? And that Canadians are . . . going to see through to what a person really is and forgive a few mistakes?”

It seems clear that as long as Trudeau’s popularity is putting plus signs in the lists of members, donors, dollars and poll results, his party is willing to keep seeing the bright side.

John McCallum, who’s been an MP since 2000, says Trudeau has changed the culture of the party in one overriding way: “For the first time in living memory there’s no doubt who is the leader of the Liberal party . . . There’s no jockeying going on.”

Scott Brison, who came to the Liberals from the Conservatives a decade ago, sums up Trudeau’s one-year achievements more succinctly: “Our adversaries are becoming more fearful and our supporters are becoming more hopeful.”

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