Dominic LeBlanc said a funny thing on Wednesday.

First, to the Toronto Star, the Liberal cabinet member said, “I’m very confident in our chances of forming a majority government.” And then a little later he told reporters much the same thing.

“I’ve said from the beginning of the campaign that we’re campaigning to win a majority government,” LeBlanc said.

It’s an interesting thing to hear with just five days left.

It was around last weekend, when the release of excerpts from former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s book were making their splash in the newspapers and the SNC scandal was once again raising it’s head that I thought, “Hmmm, smells like a Liberal win, maybe a big one.”

I hashed this out a bit on Twitter, but essentially my logic is this: However wretched that SNC Affair was, and how ever horrible the issues around ethics and the interplay between corporations and government, too much has happened since then for JWR to be the focal point of a day or two of the Conservative campaign.

More than 26,000 people are dead — more are still dying! — from COVID-19. Homes are increasingly unaffordable. There’s been a major economic shock because of the pandemic. And oh yeah the world is on fire.

And yet, here we were, after a few days of ethics talk.

It looked to me, and still does, like a Conservative campaign that had lost its way. Plus, the Liberal sink in the polls seems to be bouncing back. The polls aren’t fully there yet, and many of the projections give it a low probability of there being a Liberal majority. And yet…

Which brings us back to LeBlanc. From the start it was clear winning a majority was the point of this whole exercise. That’s why we’re having an election. The trouble was, as soon as the election was called the Liberal poll numbers dived and so even thinking the word majority was libel to sink the whole enterprise.

And now here we have a senior Liberal not just thinking about a majority, but talking about it to reporters.

But here we are, on the other side of the debates, where Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau walked away bruised but not broken. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole wasn’t a disaster — nothing like his predecessor — but he flubbed his answer about daycare in in the French-language, and didn’t really stand out in the English-language debate. And by that point O’Toole’s momentum seems to have stalled out.

So is it really that crazy to think that after all this Trudeau might pull off his dreams of a second majority? I’m inclined to think not.

But I think the Liberals have halted what looked like a terminal slide out of government. Instead, Trudeau and his party seem to have hit their stride at just the right moment. Summer has ended* and kids have gone back to school, and life has entered a period of sort-of normalcy where people are more focused on ‘real’ things, rather than summer leisure.

Voters seem to have given Erin O’Toole a look, and found him wanting. The Conservative Party leader made an interesting pitch to voters, that he was a different, nicer kind of Tory.

Pitching a sort-of compassionate conservatism — though it’s unlikely he or the party would ever invoke George W. Bush — O’Toole has made the case that he wasn’t like those other Conservatives that have come before.

People do not seem to have bought it. Sinking in the polls, increasingly firing off random attack lines and policies, his campaign seems to have peaked too early.

It’s possible if he was able to run in another campaign voters might come around to his vision of Conservative governing, pitching the same program twice tends to convince people you’re serious, but that would require his party to both want to keep him on and stay together.

Big changes — even if they’re just rhetorical ones — so soon after the last election are a lot to get a handle on. Especially when O’Toole is a former Conservative minister.

It’s tough for people to believe you are a kind and gentle party when they’ve seen how you’ve governed before, and how your allies have governed as premier in provinces across the province. It’s an interesting tactic, but one that doesn’t seem to have worked this time around. It’s an interesting play, and will be even more interesting if his party gives him another shot at it.

In any case, I don’t think it’s a certainty that Trudeau has his majority in hand. But I no longer think it’s an impossibility. Enough so that I put a $5 wager on it happening — figured I might as well put my money where my mouth is.

Now all we have to do is wait for Monday.

*Yes, yes, I know summer ends Sept. 21, but we all know what I mean here.