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Justin Trudeau is lucky he’s facing voters this year and not in 2020, when the air will be so full of lies and fallout from the U.S. presidential campaign that political messages in Canada risk being obscured.

For now, Trudeau’s Liberals are staying sunny. They’re leading the polls against lacklustre opposition, even while facing a dangerous combination of economic uncertainties beyond their control and fallout from their own mistakes.

The PM has damaged his case several times, as rookie prime ministers do. But his underwhelming rivals, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, haven’t given voters an alternative to cheer for.

As to messaging, the Liberals would love to carry on talking about their “progressive agenda,” but I sense Canadians feel fully informed on that. It’s not a winning offering in 2019.

Polls suggest the Liberals continue to do well on environmental issues. The political “resistance” to fighting climate change and “carbon taxes” creates noise but ignores genuine public concerns about the environment. Canadians aren’t unanimous about how to proceed, but the Liberals seem established as the party of the environment.

Sadly for them, the 2019 election won’t revolve around the environment but the economy. For the Liberals, the economic auguries are not entirely propitious.

The housing market in the Liberal-friendly big cities is jittery, even while many households labour under heavy debts. Personal bankruptcies are edging up and there’s uncertainty about future interest rates. Wage growth remains stubbornly slow and problems in the western oil patch seem likely to persist.

The Bank of Canada expects the overall economy to post only modest growth of 1.7 per cent this year before picking up a bit more momentum in 2020. The bank had been predicting a 2.1 per cent increase for 2019.

Still, the Liberals can point to low unemployment and fairly healthy job gains over their time in office, even if they can’t claim all the credit. For them to hold the fort in October, the economy needs to keep growing jobs.

Meanwhile, their opponents have succeeded in casting the oil-price unrest in Alberta as a Trudeau government creation. That’s partly due to local politics in a provincial election year, but Trudeau’s seeming lack of empathy for Alberta’s plight will make it harder to elect Liberals in the West.

Inevitably, the afterglow faded from the Liberals’ 2015 summer of love, as has the fun of governing. It has become such a grind that even Kings-Hants MP Scott Brison, a lifelong political warrior, is tired of the game and retiring. That’s what set off today’s minor cabinet shuffle.

What wasn’t expected in 2015 was Donald Trump. His presidency has created uncertainty in Canada over the economy, trade, political affairs, immigration, the environment, national security and mutual defence. Trump is a slow-motion car accident for this country.

So for all of the Liberals’ problems, Trump’s bumbling path into the history books presents a perfect foil for them. They don’t even have to mention his name.

That’s why Conservative supporters hate it when Canadian media covers Trump. At the very least, he’s inconvenient to them, an embarrassment. Perceptive Conservatives know their neighbours despise the man and don’t want their party to be seen supporting his nasty regime.

Still there are enough pro-Trump Conservatives to make the MAGA crowd within the CPC ranks dangerous. Eruptions of Trumpism during the election campaign would almost certainly undermine the Conservative message.

What’s worse, while Trudeau is seen to be opposing Trump, Scheer never seems to know what to say about him. The Conservative leader claimed he would have reached a better NAFTA replacement deal than the Liberals did, but I don’t know anyone who believes that.

If the economy goes sideways because of Trump’s incoherent leadership, the Liberals could get sideswiped, too. The most dangerous man in politics isn’t on the ticket in Canada, but his impact here is hard to escape.