The oxygen is about sucked out of the Liberal leadership campaign; it will be replaced by a massive dose of helium.
Justin Trudeau’s predictable entry in the contest is expected to be made official next week. The announcement will lift the profile of the campaign to uncommon heights — given the third-party status of the Liberals — and remove much of the suspense as to its outcome.
With Trudeau in, a number of otherwise serious candidates will be inclined to stay on the sidelines and not only because the MP for Papineau will come out of the gate with a huge name-recognition lead on the competition.
The only realistic way to beat such a prohibitive front-runner would be to bring a scorched-earth approach to the battle.
With the last best hopes of so many Liberals vested in Trudeau, beating him on such aggressive terms could be a hollow victory.
After years of internal strife, few Liberals have the stomach for the public immolation of a favourite son.
Trudeau’s entry makes a run for the leadership particularly unappealing to non-francophone aspirants.
The party has a tradition of alternating between leaders from French and English Canada.
Going on a search-and-destroy mission against the best-known federal Liberal in Quebec (and in the country) and, in the process, inviting the party to bypass a francophone on the way to selecting the next leader sounds like a recipe for a fourth (and final?) election disaster.
It has become a tired cliché to say that Trudeau is not the political thinker that his father used to be. As it happens, nor are the other possible contenders.
Indeed, the circumstances of Trudeau’s bid could not be more different from his father’s run 45 years ago. Back then, Pierre Trudeau came out of left field to win the leadership — and became prime minister overnight.
There is no guarantee that the next Liberal leader will ever sit on the governing side of the House of Commons. As things stand, the odds that the victor of next April’s leadership vote will one day serve in the cabinet of an NDP-led coalition government are higher than those of a swift Liberal return to power.
In the best-case scenario for the Conservatives, a Trudeau leadership victory could pave the way for a Central Canada battle to the finish between the NDP and the Liberals in the next federal election.
In Quebec, the Bloc Québécois harbours similar hopes for a division of the federalist vote.
But Stephen Harper’s strategists would not be experts at retail politics if they had not spotted at least two of their vulnerabilities to a Trudeau-led Liberal party.
His last name still resonates in many of the country’s cultural communities, in particular in Ontario; that could throw a wrench in the Conservatives’ ethnic outreach.
Jason Kenney’s decision to showcase his social conservative credentials by coming out in support of Wednesday’s abortion-related motion in the Commons may not have been just a call of religious conscience.
The message that Conservative family values are closely aligned with those of some of the country’s fastest-growing cultural communities has been central to the immigration minister’s Tory charm offensive.
The second concern for Conservatives is that Pierre Trudeau’s record on minority-language rights could stand his son in good stead in more than six Conservative ridings outside Quebec where there is a strong concentration of francophone voters.
It is no accident that Heritage Minister James Moore is spending a lot of time interacting with those communities these days.
It is also probably not a coincidence that the Conservatives are said to be reconsidering their opposition to making the ability to function in French and English a legal requirement for all future officers of Parliament.
Some Liberals may think that their leadership campaign has barely begun, but their NDP and Conservative opponents have already factored in a Trudeau victory.
Chantal Hébert is a syndicated Toronto Star national affairs writer.