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Fortuna, the wayward goddess, has abandoned her dalliance with Justin Trudeau. What he wins from here on, if he wins at all, will be on his own work, not her flippant favour.

The socks and the selfies are inert now, those props are dated, all their quaint magic gone. Even the rolled-up sleeves and the loosely knotted tie (his let’s-all-get-to-work look) come over now as a parody of the posing politician, the silk-vest patrician at the steel plant vainly affecting to identify with the sweating hard hats on the shop floor.

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None of it is working anymore. The familiar gestures are all too self-conscious, the slogans dated and flaccid, the whole play-acting schtick is dead and worse — boring. And the speeches! Monday night’s in Toronto (to launch the election-year global-warming roadshow during a -19C cold alert ) verged on the manic; parts of the opening in particular were something you might have heard in the ancient Sunday morning revivalists’ broadcasts back in the Dark Ages of early television, Jimmy Swaggart or Garner Ted Armstrong raging against the darkness. It was eerie.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

The two-minute concessionary acknowledgment of Jane Philpott’s resignation was insultingly perfunctory, swaddled in all the usual pompousness of “diversity” and “listening to other views,” utterly out of touch with the gravity and import of her departure, and the moral indictment of his government in which she framed it.