@xahlee I think a really big part of it was simply that he wasn't Stephen Harper. Many Canadians would have voted for almost anybody to get the Harper Conservative Party out of power; they were anti-Harper, not pro-Trudeau. But things look a lot different in the current election: objection to Scheer, the new Conservative leader, is on Culture War grounds rather than the policy issues that were the reason for rejecting Harper, and that's an unwinnable game for Trudeau in the long run.