If Justin Trudeau manages to pull off a victory on Oct. 21, he will have some major IOUs piled up with his candidates and Liberal troops on the ground. This is a sea change for Liberals, with far-reaching implications for Trudeau and his party.

Four years after Trudeau carried Liberals to victory on the shoulders of his own mass popularity, his party is in the midst of a very different campaign — one in which the candidates are out on the ground, making the case for a leader who is far less beloved than he was in 2015.

No matter what happens on election day, that is going to rattle the leader-centric dynamics of Trudeau’s Liberal party — and ultimately, perhaps, the Prime Minister’s Office, if that’s where he lands again after this campaign.

Over two days in Toronto this week, going door to door with Liberals in a city known as a stronghold for the party, it was clear that a number of voters, even loyal partisans, want some reassurances about the man who has been prime minister since 2015. The starry celebrity of four years ago has been brought down to earth and is now a battle-scarred politician like all others.

“You’ve got your work cut out for you here,” a young man says when he steps into a Toronto condominium elevator and notices a small team of campaigners holding pamphlets for Chrystia Freeland, who has been serving as foreign affairs minister and MP for University-Rosedale in Trudeau’s government.

By way of explanation, the man mimes the act of rubbing his face with black paint and laughs as he exits the elevator. The Freeland campaign team doesn’t join in the laughter. While they don’t find a lot of people home in the 12-storey building over the lunch hour, they do get a number of residents saying “I don’t know” and “still deciding” when asked whether they’re voting for the Liberals.

Trudeau’s name and face are far less visible — even non-existent — on the signs dotting the streets of downtown Toronto. His candidates are working hard to earn another term for the Liberals, but they’re doing a lot of it on their own steam. They really do have their work cut out for them, as that man in the elevator said, and it’s a very grassroots effort of persuasion, often one vote at a time.

At the doorsteps in Beaches—East York, popular Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith regularly reminds his constituents that he has been an independent voice in Trudeau’s caucus over the past four years, not blindly following the leader and the PMO.

“I’ve always been a Liberal,” one woman says as she takes Erskine-Smith’s literature. “But in the last week, my vote is up for grabs.” She stresses the words “last week” as shorthand for the controversy that blew up in the campaign when multiple photos emerged of a younger Trudeau in blackface.

Erskine-Smith agrees that the revelations were “disappointing” but says his leader’s apologies have been sincere. He then pivots to a list of Liberal accomplishments and good intentions when it comes to climate change and poverty reduction.

Not everyone in Erskine-Smith’s riding has been fussed by the blackface controversy. In Erskine-Smith’s campaign office on the Danforth, an older man walks in off the street and asks for a Liberal sign, saying he’s annoyed by all the noise being made about Trudeau’s past. “Come on,” he says. “Everybody does stupid things in their past.”

On a porch in a Beaches—East York cul-de-sac, two older couples are enjoying drinks together and they hail Erskine-Smith to come over and tell them how things are going in the election. The candidate is upbeat, asking what’s on their minds. One of the men refers to the blackface controversy with a dismissive wave of his hand — “I don’t much care about that” — but he says he is worried about all the talk of more Liberal spending for another four years.

“I’ve seen promises, but I haven’t seen how it’s funded,” he says.

Liberals in Toronto have seen some bleak times over the past decade. When the party was reduced to third-party status in the 2011 election, many of the questions were existential: could the party continue to exist?

Along came the phenomenon known as Justin Trudeau, beloved son of a former prime minister, with some celebrity wattage all his own. Winning the leadership handily in 2013, Trudeau rebuilt the party from the top down, on the strength of his own ability to pull crowds, and from the bottom up, with a sophisticated rebuilding of the Liberal ranks through digital and data technology. On that basis, Trudeau could — rightly, perhaps — claim that the party belonged to him, and that many MPs owed their place in Parliament to their celebrity leader.

Inside Trudeau’s circle, the huge victory of the 2015 election was seen as a payoff for two efforts: the leader and campaign narrative achieved the overall win, it was said, and the digital campaign sealed the majority.

Now, though, with the leader more of a mixed blessing — certainly not the top-down phenomenon Trudeau was four years ago — the on-the-ground campaign is almost certainly going to be more crucial. In short, Liberals aren’t going to win on Trudeau’s appeal alone this time. They’re going to need every tool they have at the grassroots. Candidates matter, and so does the ground game, maybe even more than the leader, or in spite of him in some cases.

Canvass teams across the country are impressively deployed. Liberal campaign headquarters has calculated just how many voters need to be identified as Liberals in each riding before Oct. 21 to assure victory for that seat. It happens one by one, doorstep by doorstep, no shortcuts.

Canvassers carry smartphones with an app — called MiniVAN — that keeps track of doors knocked and reactions received. It tells them which doors to approach and asks canvassers to record whether this particular household needs a nudge toward voting Liberal or simply turning up at the polls. It also tells them which doors to avoid (people who won’t be voting Liberal for any number of reasons). Campaign offices, such as the one in Beaches—East York or University-Rosedale, chart the progress on brightly coloured maps on their walls.

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Back in 2015, one of the Liberals’ main fights was to take over NDP-held ridings. Trudeau’s team pulled that off handily in downtown Toronto, effectively wiping out the NDP in all of the 416 area code. Erskine-Smith was one of the Liberals who took over a New Democrat riding, in this case from incumbent New Democrat MP Matthew Kellway.

In advance of this election, with the NDP flagging in the polls and in fundraising, it didn’t seem a stretch to believe that Liberals could perform that feat again.

But Beaches—East York is dotted with a not-insignificant number of NDP signs from rookie candidate Mae Nam. On Tuesday this week, her campaign office was buzzing with activity and volunteers.

On Erskine-Smith’s sprint around the riding on Tuesday night, several homeowners answered their doors saying they were still taking a look at the NDP and Liberals, and weighing up where to place their vote.

Clearly, to use that old Mark Twain quote, reports of the NDP’s demise have been somewhat exaggerated, at least in Beaches—East York.

Overwhelmingly, Erskine-Smith says, climate change is the No. 1 issue coming up at the doors in the riding. “That’s the biggest concern, no question,” he says, describing how this riding, close to the water, seems particularly attuned to climate questions.

Erskine-Smith was hoping that Trudeau, on the national tour, would start talking up climate change more in the coming days of the campaign, so the candidate, in turn, could start telling people at the doorstep how important this issue was to his leader, too.

It’s an interesting snapshot of where this Liberal leader and his candidates are fighting two different campaigns. Candidates still need the help of the leader, but in this Liberal campaign of 2019, maybe not as much as they needed him four years ago, and they’ll go it alone at the doorstep if and when they must.

It’s too early to predict what will happen on Oct. 21, but this basic dynamic of the 2019 Liberal campaign will almost certainly have an effect if Trudeau does end up as prime minister again: MPs will be less likely to feel that they owe their seats to him and his team. It’s not as easy to get Liberals falling into line with unquestioning loyalty to the leader and PMO after an election like this.

Nor can Trudeau simply use these candidates and MPs as mere backdrops to a party that’s all about him, as he did during his first term in office.

Four years ago, Trudeau was promising to decentralize the leader’s operation in the party and the government, to return some power and authority to individual MPs and Liberals. In 2019, thanks to some hard knocks at the top for Trudeau, not to mention some campaign explosions, that’s no longer a pie-in-the-sky promise, but a practical necessity.

That old 2015 slogan for Trudeau — “hope and hard work” — has a sharper meaning in the current campaign. Trudeau’s hopes may very well hinge on his candidates’ hard work — and he’ll owe them big if he does win.

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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