Stephen Harper is now gone, but (as a friend only quarter-jokingly said) Canada got the second worst outcome sold as the best — so now what? The election of Justin Trudeau raises as many questions as answers. And there are no easy ones.

In 2015, the Liberals once again showed that they are masters at campaigning to the left. But as we now wait for them to show how equally apt they are at governing to the right, it’s clear that it won’t simply do to say “told you so!” in four years time. It is not by accident that the Liberals are Canada’s “natural governing party,” for if anything, they know how to govern. They are experts at balancing competing interests — or, more accurately, appearing to balance competing interests all while promoting those of the elite, and the upper middle class.

Still, we have to recognize that things will be different and that this affects where people are and how they relate to politics. On the one hand, the Liberals do open up some space on the Left by making symbolic gestures here and there; at the same time, they close off this space by drawing the limits of respectable progressive politics. They don’t fill the void created by a weak left like the Conservatives, who try to appeal to the working class on the basis of an exclusionary, pocketbook politics. In fact, they speak to a broader cross-class progressive segment of the population in a way that can be disorienting.