The last federal election campaign was one of the longest in Canadian history. But if you thought the 78-day election of 2015 was a prolonged drama, wait until you see what’s in store for next year.

Essentially, the political year of 2019 will be a three-act play.

There’s the official campaign, due to kick off in early to mid-September, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits the Governor General and kicks off Canada’s 43rd election, set for Oct. 21.

Then there’s the newly established “pre-election campaign,” which is now a formal time period under election-reform legislation passed by MPs and senators just before they left for the Christmas break. This new pre-election period, which features rules of engagement and spending limits for all political participants, gets underway on June 30, meaning that politicians of all stripes will be electioneering in earnest on the usual summer barbecue circuit.

And then there’s the unofficial, election-positioning period for 2019, which starts pretty much as soon as the New Year’s festivities are over. In other words, almost all of 2019 — 294 days, if you like — will be an election year in federal politics.

Long election campaigns can be brutal on political players but they can be good citizenship exercises. The 2015 campaign, for instance, resulted in a marked increase in voter turnout — a nearly 10-percentage-point increase over the 2011 turnout numbers, and much of it because of a surge in participation from young people and Indigenous Canadians.

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That lengthy campaign also featured some significant debates over policy and issues, such as whether Canadians’ thinking about deficits had evolved, or how open this country was to refugees and people wearing religious clothing. The fact that the campaign unfolded against a global backdrop of a Syrian refugee crisis, we’ll remember, also introduced a rare foreign-policy component in a domestic election.

So what will Canadians get out of a nearly 300-day election campaign — unofficial, pre-election and official — in 2019?

Well, it’s entirely possible that there will be a serious debate or two over policy. Parties on both sides of the issue have said they will be delighted to fight a campaign over climate change and carbon pricing in Canada. As well, ongoing global developments, especially when it comes to migration and refugees, promise to keep those topics on the front burner of Canadian politics.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Canadians are in the same mood about foreign policy in 2019 as they were in 2015. Canada-U.S. relations have radically transformed, for instance. Donald Trump was not even a serious presidential contender when Canada last went to the polls; now President Trump is a dominant influence in Canadian politics.

Many of the political developments in Trump’s America have been bleeding over into Canada since he went into the White House, too — and that’s bound to continue while this country moves into election gear.

In 2019, it may not be foreign policy but foreign interference that elbows its way into our electoral politics. Several warnings have already been sounded from security and other officials.

None other than Karina Gould, Canada’s own minister of democratic institutions, has said that it is “virtually impossible” to thwart foreign interference in elections, even though her government’s new election legislation takes some steps in that direction.

“Based on our research … on global elections, foreign players could use social media platforms to influence the voting” of Canadians, Gould testified before the Senate in November.

Gould was highlighting another big difference we’ll be seeing between the 2019 election and the last one. Four years ago, social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were seen largely as a force for good in Canadian politics: a way to boost participation and voter interest. Now, in the shadow of controversy over the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica and its role in Trump’s 2016 campaign, enthusiasm for Big Data is more muted. All the parties still need the high-tech tools of micro-targeting and databases, but they won’t be boasting about their mastery of that universe as they once did.

As for Twitter, Trump has helped turned that medium into dangerous, unpredictable terrain for politics in 2019. If the Canadian federal election of 2019 is going to turn ridiculous, Twitter will no doubt be ground zero.

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In three other ways, the next year in politics will also see some departure points from past campaigns. If we’re still thinking in sets of three for the next year in politics, you could call them the three P’s: populism, personality and the provinces.

The inevitable populism element of Election 2019 is also an offshoot of the Trump effect on Canadian politics, even though populist anger is also emerging as a major force in elections all over the world. All Canadian parties know that there are pockets of populist discontent all over the country, especially in areas hit hard by economic decline — in oil-price-ravaged Alberta, for instance, or in Oshawa, where General Motors is pulling out of town.

Populism tends to rear its head in election campaigns as protest votes against governments in power, so it’ll be worth watching how the 2019 budget is framed. It will likely be unveiled in late February or March.

Trudeau’s government pitched the fall economic statement in late 2018 as a pitch to business — the budget is expected to talk more to individual Canadians, especially the beleaguered middle class. In 2015, all everyone wanted to talk about was the middle class. Don’t expect that to change in 2019.

Personality is always a big factor in elections, but it’s already looking like 2019 will have an especially personal edge, particularly between the Conservatives and Liberals, but also for the untested New Democratic Party leader, Jagmeet Singh. He may get an early opportunity to practise some campaign moves in 2019 if the prime minister, as expected, calls a byelection in Burnaby South early in the new year.

For a sneak preview of how personal things will get on this score in 2019, one needed only to have been watching question period on the last Wednesday before the Commons rose for the holiday break.

Wednesdays in the chamber are always raucous — the parties hold spirited caucus meetings in the morning, and the partisanship tends to spill over into Commons proceedings in the afternoon. But this final Wednesday of the 2018 sitting calendar looked a lot like a grudge match between Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who were doing all the questioning and answering for their sides that day.

Scheer used the occasion to paint Trudeau as an out-of-touch elite, who has no connection with the middle class he claims to champion.

“The prime minister has often boasted about inheriting a great family fortune,” Scheer said. “He has never had to worry about the cost of living, so it is no wonder that he does not worry when his policies drive up the cost for Canadians. His tax on gas, on home heating and on groceries will hurt seniors, suburban moms and small businesses.”

Trudeau, meanwhile, repeatedly cast Scheer as another version of past prime minister Stephen Harper, obviously in the belief that the anti-Harper sentiment that worked for the Liberals in 2015 will work in 2019, too.

“I look forward to going against what seems to be the Harper Conservative platform once again,” Trudeau said. “Conservatives, like Stephen Harper and Doug Ford, and the current leader are so ideologically against any environmental protection.”

That reference to Ford is noteworthy — it’s looking like provinces will have a larger-than-usual role in Election 2019 too. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has already declared that he will be working to defeat Trudeau in the next federal election and it seems the prime minister is happy for now to cast Ford as Scheer’s ally.

While it’s not unusual for the governments at Queen’s Park and Ottawa to be ideologically opposed, this open antagonism could make things very volatile in 2019. Ford is already lining up with other provincial politicians who aren’t all that friendly with Trudeau’s Liberals either: Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe and Alberta’s United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney (who might be premier by the time the federal election rolls around).

One feature of the last campaign will most likely make a return appearance in the next federal election — unpredictability. When that long campaign started in August of 2015, many were predicting the death of the Liberal party and the real possibility of then NDP leader Tom Mulcair as the next prime minister.

We know now how that turned out. So as Canadian politics moves into the three-act election play in 2019, it’s probably wise to avoid those who claim to have spoiler alerts. Long shows can have unpredictable endings.

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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