TALK OF THE TOWN — Prime Minister JUSTIN TRUDEAU has faced one question over and over during the past year. It has been asked numerous ways, but always goes something like this: Canadians are upset with him, as made clear by the brutal polls, so why won’t he leave — for the good of his party? At every opportunity, Trudeau insists he’s staying put. If you ask the Prime Minister’s Office, they’ll say he’s answered the question a zillion times already. If you ask around Ottawa, party rank-and-file respond with some form of the same line: I don’t think he’s going anywhere. — OK, but what if…: It’s his call, and the second he wavers, that’s it — all bets are off, his career is toast and a leadership race informally starts. It’s not something he’d ever admit unless he’s sincerely ready to go. The window for that is closing. — Count backwards: “He could leave in early summer,” former Liberal finance minister JOHN MANLEY tells Playbook. “After that, it becomes just too tight for the party to put together a race that they would want to have a lot of profile on.” The conventional view is the party would need something like six months to run a leadership race, hold a convention and vote, then promote a new leader ahead of the next election, likely a year and change out from now. The more time passes, the harder that all becomes. — Logistics nightmare: ANDREW BALFOUR of Rubicon said in such a scenario, the party would have to take time aside for some hard thinking and planning since it switched from traditional memberships to more of a movement of supporters. “So, then, how do you create a system to elect someone?” Then the financing of it, finding a big convention center, and so on, plus the election-campaign factor. “It's difficult for money to come in for the party to be ready for an election if everyone is donating to leadership candidates.” — More to the point: “It's not just how much time it would take to run a leadership race,” said former Liberal MP MARTHA HALL FINDLAY, who twice sought party leadership, though she would not talk about deadlines for such a personal decision for the PM. “The bigger issue is: Will that new person have enough time for Canadians to get to know them and understand what they stand for to put up an effective campaign?” — Put another way: “He’s not running out of time,” said pollster NIK NANOS, “but the party is running out of time.” — Plus, the dance partner: “At some point [the NDP] are going to have to pull the plug on the parliamentary arrangement, but not trigger an election,” Nanos said. “You can't one day be propping up the government and then the next day ask for votes. So, there's got to be for the New Democrats like a six-month cooling-off period” before the deal expires in June 2025. — Canada Day watch: Columnist CHANTAL HÉBERT chatted about the PM’s “serious calendar issues” with Spark Advocacy pollster BRUCE ANDERSON on PETER MANSBRIDGE’s Good Talk pod about a month ago, both giving JT a before-July-1st date for his last window. When Playbook chatted with Anderson, he brought up a timeline counterpoint. — No ‘hard clock’: “If the Liberal Party found itself in a situation a year from now, where it was 25 points behind in the polls, do I really think that they would get together at caucus on a Wednesday and say, ‘Yeah, let's just keep going in this direction’? I don't believe that’s how the chemistry of politics works.” Anderson sees the “market as being unsettled,” since there are a lot of voters searching for “a less-right option than Poilievre and a less-left option than Justin Trudeau.” “In the past, you would need six months, 12 months, 18 months to really build and renew,” he added. “I don't know that the kind of historical takes on this are as reliable in the time in which we live, where opinions can develop in days or hours.” — No clear successor: Even with the constant rumblings about MARK CARNEY and the full lineup of other potential contenders, several said it’s hard to imagine a dump-Trudeau movement. “Everything seems to be in a real state of flux,” Hall Findlay said of the hot goss that ebbs and flows in Liberal circles about potential replacements. “My sense is that there's still an awful lot of uncertainty.” — Why go home?: The PM has one big reason to stay: PIERRE POILIEVRE. “Here's someone that really, really cranks [Trudeau’s] gears, that he believes he can defeat,” one former senior Liberal told Playbook. “He sees someone who's actively going to undo everything he's tried to achieve” Journalist STEPHEN MAHER notes in his upcoming book on Trudeau that the PM has told everyone in his orbit that he’s keen for the battle ahead. Trudeau told Maher he got into politics to “have big fights like this, about who we are as a country and where we’re going.”The Walrus ran an excerpt of that section from the book. — Groundhog Day, redux: We’ve been here before, too. Recently, even. The chattering class watched with anticipation as PIERRE TRUDEAU’s walk-in-the-snow anniversary, Feb. 28, came and went. Justin did not see his shadow. He did not walk. — The Hill Times today via ABBAS RANA: "Odds are stacked against the governing Liberals, making some MPs “nervous” and “uneasy” about the next election, but caucus members are vowing to go all-in against the federal Conservatives led by Poilievre." — The POLITICO homepage read:If you think Biden has troubles, just look at Trudeau. | 
