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Photo by Larry Wong/Postmedia News

Both promised so much, however, and proved unable to deliver. The euphoria that greeted Trudeau’s victory and Notley’s triumph was always a bit unrealistic. The disillusion that’s followed is a direct result. Progressivism’s belief system is all about the advances to be gained from bonhomie and good intent, the great advances waiting to be seized via right-minded people waging a just campaign for the greater good.

In advance of October’s election, Trudeau, under pressure from scandals and missteps, is already on the road seeking to give new life to that revivalist spirit.

“The choice Canadians will be facing is one about striving forward confidently into the future and knowing that if we work together we can solve these big problems,” he declared in a speech to party members Wednesday.

Photo by Christopher Katsarov/CP

He didn’t explain why more than three years of striving has produced so little forward marching. He also has far fewer fellow travellers to call on for support than he did the first time around. In 2015 he had a great friend in Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne, a Liberal premier in Quebec who forswore the separatist card, and a seeming sea-change in Alberta politics. He tossed around pledges of kinship like candies at a Halloween bash. He found Notley happy to deal: she’d give him a carbon tax and he’d help her get a pipeline. The times seemed ripe: Alberta was portrayed as a community on the cusp of change, with a population of young, enlightened migrants from other provinces certain to free it from the hidebound conservatism of earlier generations.

Stuff got in the way, finances being one of them. Money never seems important to progressives until it’s not there, as Wynne learned when 14 years of heavy borrowing finally aroused alarm in complaisant Ontarians. In Trudeau’s bailiwick, future planning consisted of “the budget will balance itself,” despite plans for several years of deficits. To Alberta’s New Democrats, the fact the province had relatively little debt meant it had plenty of room to borrow. Notley defiantly vowed to ramp up spending in spite of collapsing revenues.

Money never seems important to progressives until it’s not there

Like so many others on the left, she argued that public “investment” would soften the impact of lost jobs and the cruelties of the market. Maybe it did, to some extent, but four years later Calgary’s office towers still echo emptily and unemployment remains well above the national average, while the borrowing continues.

To her credit, Notley showed the ability to adapt, a skill Trudeau has yet to demonstrate. Without a pipeline, oil couldn’t get to new markets. Without new customers, government income stagnated. Without more money, the deficits just piled up, and all the hopeful forecasts proved faulty. All of a sudden Notley sounded like an angry Tory, threatening to shut off oil supplies to B.C., buying up rail cars to move stranded crude, labelling federal tanker ban legislation “a stampede of stupid.”