Here we are halfway through the first week of this campaign and I’ve got a funny feeling.

I think NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is going to come out with a win. I don’t mean he’ll be the next prime minister, that seems like too much of a long shot, but I think he’s going to make some considerable inroads this election.

There has been something flat about Liberal Leader/Prime Minister Justin Trudeau these first few days. He doesn’t seem to have figured out why he is running other than it looked like the right time to increase his seat count. He hasn’t fared any better than I did trying to talk himself into making this election about getting a mandate to do big things over the next years coming out of a catastrophe like COVID.

Of course it’s early. It’s not like Trudeau hasn’t won elections before, it’s actually something he’s pretty good at. But he’s going to need something a bit bigger than announcing the government will train 1,000 firefighters.

For an election Trudeau has called the most important since 1945, it sure seems to be lacking that tangy zip of meaningful campaigning. And I think the big beneficiary of that is going to be Singh.

People largely seem in the mood to keep government in their lives. The ghosts of Stephen Harpers past are still lurking, and people don’t really care for that kind of grim parsimony.

Besides, Singh has Trudeau pegged.

Watching his opening election ad and you can really see where Singh’s advantage lies. “For six years we’ve heard Justin Trudeau say the right thing with no intention of doing it,” summing up the Liberals’ latest turn in government in a one neat and tidy package.

It’s the kind of thing that works well because it’s just so on point. Conservative attacks that Trudeau is some kind of horribly corrupt bungler just don’t land with the same force.

This is by no means a government that has performed perfectly, but it hasn’t performed horribly, either. It’s walked the line of good-enough governance in a country that doesn’t expect anything much better. So the Tory attacks tend feel hyperbolic and overblown.

But to call this a government that’s all talk and no action? That’s something that lands.

There is nothing they love more than talking about how great they are, and in making a show using the right words. But, again and again, they fail to deliver to the same level as their rhetoric. It makes the Liberal road to a majority victory harder, because this government is a known quantity. The public will be less willing to buy what they’re selling, having been burned so often in the past.

An easy example here is Trudeau’s promise that 2015 would be the last election using the first-past-the-post system. We are now into our second FPTP election since he made and broke that promise.

I could go through a list of things that the Liberals promised and failed to deliver on, but by then I’d have written a whole policy book.

This is why I think the NDP has a good a shot as any this time around.

For all the good the pandemic supports were able to do for regular people, they were still weighted heavily toward corporations, who took in tens of millions of dollars, still turned huge profits, then paid out dividends and executive bonuses like it was any other year. People understand the fundamental unfairness of that.

This is where the NDP promise to claw back benefits to corporations who took public money only to line their own pockets is a good one. It’s also more straightforward that a bunch of new ethics laws, like the Tories are promising.

It’s part of the party’s broader message that government can and should be the vehicle to make people’s lives better. It’s one of the great failings of the current government that they often opt to make people’s lives slightly better, but not too much better.

Plus, Singh is just so personable. His solid debate performances last time around bode well for his second kick at the can. If he’s able to repeat that performance and prove it wasn’t just a one-time fluke, he’ll make a solid case to the public he’s got what it takes to move up in the world.

Campaigns are long, and weird, and what seems obvious at the start can be totally off base by the end. But Singh is starting off with a solid message at a time when Liberal support seems soft and tentative.

It’s a real opportunity for the NDP to make some serious gains. The true test of Singh as a leader is whether he’s able to capitalize on the opportunity. He has everything at his disposal to get this one right, he just needs to make it though the next month without any stumbles.

But deep down, I’ve got the feeling he has it in him. That this is his time, and his party’s time.