This is an excerpt from Minority Report, a weekly newsletter on federal politics. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.

It’s possible to make too much out of the first face-to-face showdown between Pierre Poilievre as leader of the opposition and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But there was one sentence exchanged between the two on Thursday afternoon — one word, really — that might define this next period of Canadian politics.

“On this side of the aisle,” Trudeau said, finishing his fifth and final response to Poilievre, “we are going to stay focused on helping Canadians for real.”

It’s too soon to