In Poilievre, Liberals face a leader who gets under his opponents' skin

A few days before he stepped into a boxing ring with Senator Patrick Brazeau in 2012, Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons and asked the Conservative government about its support for young people.

James Moore, the heritage minister at the time, stood to respond.

"My colleague will have to wait for the budget tomorrow but I know that he is very anxious to please Canadians," Moore teased.

"I think the best way for him to please Canadians would be on Saturday night, when he gets into the ring. If he keeps his hands nice and low and keeps his chin nice and high, he will be giving Canadians the greatest show we have been waiting for."

There was applause on the government side of the House of Commons.

Those Conservatives no doubt were very eager to see Pierre Trudeau's long-haired son get his comeuppance that week. They're still waiting.

Justin Trudeau won his fight against Brazeau via technical knockout. A year later, he won the Liberal leadership. And then he won three consecutive federal elections, dispatching Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O'Toole in the process. Later this fall, he'll mark seven years as prime minister.

If Trudeau can drive Conservatives to distraction, he now faces an opposition leader who can arouse similarly intense feelings in Liberals. And if the Liberals hope to win a fourth straight election, they'll have to at least avoid making the same mistakes Conservatives have made with Trudeau.

But the biggest looming question is whether Trudeau has one more big fight left in him.

For more than seven years, Conservatives have alternately underestimated Trudeau's political ability and overestimated their own ability to knock him down, taking wild swings that failed to connect. It would be easy for the Liberals to fall into the same trap as they face Poilievre.

While the Liberals languished in opposition from 2006 to 2015, Poilievre was the Conservative government's precocious agitator — needling the opposition and mocking their accusations. At the height of the battle over the Fair Elections Act in 2014, Liberal MP Wayne Easter furiously compared debating Poilievre to playing chess with a pigeon.

"He flaps his wings all over the place, knocks the pieces off the table, messes all over the table, then struts around as if he won the game," Easter told the House.

However apt some Liberals find that comparison, Poilievre has shown himself to be a talented politician who gives a significant amount of thought to how he communicates and debates — decidedly more than the average pigeon.

"All of us in politics these days make the mistake of focusing too much on getting the right lines … Actually, what people want are the right facts. And they don't need to be complicated, archaic facts. Rather, they need to be clear, simple, documented, irrefutable," Poilievre told me in an interview in 2014.