Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has had a tough month. His polling has been in the dumps. His partner in the coalition government backed away from him. Several of his top government officials have resigned. And his party lost an election for a safe seat they've held for decades. Now, as promised last week, the Conserviatives have set up a no-confidence vote for tomorrow.

As expected and promised, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives introduced a non-confidence motion on Tuesday in an attempt to topple Justin Trudeau’s government.

The motion was read out by the speaker at the start of proceedings.

“The House has no confidence in the prime minister and the government,” it simply stated.

This effort is not going to pass because the two left-leaning parties, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois, have both vowed to support Trudeau to prevent conservatives coming to power.

Singh’s withdrawal of support for the Liberals might have harmed his own electoral prospects, but inadvertently benefited another leader: Yves-François Blanchet of the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois.

Blanchet has stepped in to fill the void left by the NDP’s exit from the confidence and supply agreement, but he has been open about the hardheaded political calculus behind the move.

“It’s not [about] supporting the government. It’s [about] not having them fall, soon,” Blanchet told CBC News. “First, I will let this vote instigated by the Conservatives go through. They will lose it, and by the way lose face, and this is what they deserve presently because they are not doing politics in a clean way … I ask for things and if I don’t get it, [the government] will fall. And that’s the end to it.”

The fact that the NDP tore up its agreement with the Liberals but is voting to keep them in power anyway has become a point of real bitterness in the Canadian House of Commons. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh reportedly tried to start a fight with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre a few days ago after Poilievre criticized him as a "fraud" and a "sellout."

Meanwhile, here in America, Late Night host Stephen Colbert did his best to polish Trudeau's image last night by having as a guest on his show. Colbert is nothing if not consistent in his desire to polish boots for left-wing politicians. That interview is making a lot of news north of the border, with some columnists suggesting American Democrats are probably jealous they don't have a candidate as great as Trudeau.

You can just imagine what it was like for liberal American viewers, laid up with resurfacing PTSD in the form of the political return of Donald Trump, to watch Justin Trudeau on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Here’s an experienced leader who is calm and reasonable, and can put a sentence together. Who sympathetically acknowledges the difficulties Canadians are dealing with, while also being proud of what makes the country great: not the mountains and maple syrup (though they’re good too), but the people – and the programs meant to help them, including universal health care.

No thanks. You can keep Trudeau, Canada. Other observers saw the interview as a weird throwback to another time when Trudeau was popular and people were enamored of his act.

Watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau get cosy with “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert last night, one couldn’t help but feel like they’d fallen through some transdimensional time portal into the year 2016. It’s the sort of PR-baiting stunt that marked Trudeau Jr.’s early charm offensive: back in those heady, halcyon days when American men’s magazine were oozing ink over his novelty socks, and mall kiosks were practically ballasted by those “Justin Trudeau, My Canadian Boyfriend” wall calendars...

If Trudeau is serious about holding onto power, he’ll have to offer something more than some vague platitudes about multiculturalism, or flexing about once meeting Chewbacca. At the end of the night, Trudeau’s Late Show tour felt, uncomfortably, like one of those newer Star Wars sequels: a warmed-over throwback to a once-beloved media darling, crucially lacking in the charm of the original.

Trudeau is certainly a much more natural speaker than Kamala Harris will ever be but he's trying to project the same sort of floating-above-it-all, chipper attitude as Harris. Even when he talks about why Canadians are so unhappy at the moment it feels like he's just recalling a list of unfortunate stats rather than owning up to anything about his own government. His explanation for his unpopularity is basically that bad things happened and he was there. I guess every long-serving politician gets some of that but there are also plenty of things he's personally done that have made him less popular over time. There's no mention of any of that here of course. This interview is much closer to being the video version of the Justin Trudeau, My Canadian Boyfriend wall calendar.