Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives to make an announcement on his political future outside his residence at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa on Jan. 6.Justin Tang/The Globe and Mail

It was -22 C with the wind chill in Ottawa on Monday morning, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the decision that had become unavoidable, though its inevitability seemed to occur to him much later than others.

His office sent word less than two hours in advance, with a statement that read simply, “The Prime Minister will be making an announcement and answering questions from the media this morning at 10:45 a.m.”

Mr. Trudeau would do this at Rideau Cottage, before the charming, Georgian revival front porch of his residence, where Canadians grew accustomed to seeing his increasingly shaggy self offering daily COVID-19 updates to their increasingly shaggy stay-at-home selves, nearly five years ago.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends a news conference at Rideau Cottage, in Ottawa, Ontario, January 22, 2021.BLAIR GABLE/Reuters

When media arrived, they deposited their gear on the floor of a garage for an RCMP dog to snuffle. As a concession to the harsh weather, the journalists were allowed to hang out in the heated garage, clumped between a couple of dark sedans with tinted windows, an RCMP 4X4 and an alarmingly organized wire rack of cleaning supplies.

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This was the pristine working garage of the RCMP officers who guard the Prime Minister’s property, not a family’s garage with bikes and outgrown toys and recycling bins heaped in the corner.

The only visible bits of family life surrounded the house itself, where a basketball hoop and hockey net stood along the driveway and the wizened remains of a snow fort huddled under a big pine tree in the side yard. It was strangely intimate, almost impertinent, to see these reminders that a real family with three kids lives in this official residence, and that the man who would soon emerge from the house to do the thing everyone had been baying at him to do belonged to that world, too.

A lectern stood ready, and in front of it were two teleprompters, which consisted of a video screen on the ground and a square of clear plastic at eye height, angled so it picked up the reflection of the video screen below. Shortly before 11 a.m., the screens went live, scrolling through Mr. Trudeau’s speech as some unseen hand edited here and there.

The screens display a mirror image so that the text appears the right way when the speaker looks at the reflection. And so you had earnest, poignant thoughts like his opening line – “Every morning I’ve woken up as Prime Minister, I have been inspired by the resilience, the generosity and the determination of Canadians” – passed through a funhouse mirror, in both official languages.

A few minutes later, Mr. Trudeau stepped alone through his front door. The moment he did, the wind kicked up and grabbed the hard copy pages of his speech from the lectern, tossing them across the driveway in front of the photographers and reporters crouched in ready positions.

Ann-Clara Vaillancourt, Mr. Trudeau’s director of media relations, gasped in horror and took a step or two toward the tumbling pages like she might try to gather them up, then stopped.

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“I’ll just wing it,” Mr. Trudeau said.

In defiance of that witty ad lib, he looked tired and drawn.

Over the holidays, he’d had a chance to think and to talk with his family about their future, Mr. Trudeau said, crediting their support with any success he’d experienced over his career.

“So last night, over dinner, I told my kids about the decision that I’m sharing with you today,” he said. “I intend to resign as party leader and as Prime Minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide competitive process.”

Mr. Trudeau said he had asked the party president to set those wheels in motion, because the next election needed to present Canadians with a real choice, and it had become clear to him that he could not be part of it. Parliament had been “paralyzed for months,” he said, and he had asked Governor-General Mary Simon to prorogue the House of Commons until late March.

His eyes looked glassy and reddened and his voice was ragged when he talked about the elements of the situation most closely tied to his own career. Throughout his remarks, Mr. Trudeau often rolled his ankles outward, like an unsure kid.

A reporter asked why he had decided to step down only now, when things had been ugly for so long. He invoked a metaphor he’s often used to explain himself – that of a boxer refusing to give in, even when he might be about to get his lights knocked out.

“As you all know, I am a fighter, and I am not someone who backs away from a fight, particularly when a fight is as important as this one is,” the Prime Minister said, adding, “Canadians deserve a real choice in the next election, and it has become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election.”

What was striking was the obvious emotion etched into his face, voice and body language. It was arresting precisely because it has been so long since Mr. Trudeau betrayed anything that seemed like a real reaction that responded directly to the moment.

He has spent so much time, energy and political capital over the past year or two functioning like a rictus grin on legs, insisting everything is fine. The economy, the mood of the country, his party’s standing, his own standing atop his party: It was all great or would soon right itself, regardless of the smoke everyone could see billowing out the windows.

Seeing a messy, honest reaction from him and an acknowledgment – however filtered – that things were far from fine was like a postcard sent long ago from a country you’d almost forgotten exists.

The questions chase each other like a merry-go-round. If Mr. Trudeau had been able to muster more humility and bluntness long ago, would it all have ended up here? Or did it take this – and whatever torturous conversations he had with others and himself to land here – to wrench this from him?

How does he think we got here, and could it have gone another way?

By the last few minutes of his remarks, Mr. Trudeau’s legs were visibly trembling from the cold, though he had been standing outside for a much shorter time than everyone else.

It was very, very cold in Ottawa on the morning Justin Trudeau finally did the thing he needed to do. And even if the feeling settled into his bones last of all, eventually he ended up in the same place as everyone else.

Senior political reporter Marieke Walsh analyzes the fallout of Justin Trudeau's resignation as prime minister, from the lonely visual of him making the announcement on Jan. 6 to the contenders to take his place and the very short runway they have to make an impression.

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