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Chapter one of that immersive education experience unfolded on Monday as Parliament resumed sitting. So how did they do?

They are definitely aspiring to present themselves as different — for Carney, that’s not just being different from his old, pre-political self, but from his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. For Poilievre, it means toning down the aggressive, attack-dog posture, one he pulled off so well that Canadians rewarded him in the last election with a mandate to stay in opposition.

Monday’s debut made clear that Liberals and Conservatives are determined to show that things have changed, that this is more than a reshuffled Commons of the past decade. We know this because of all the efforts they were making to insist that nothing has changed on the opposite side of the House.

“Just another Liberal” seems to be the new slogan for Conservatives, the party that really does love slogans. It was uttered, by my count in the rough transcript, eight times across aisle during this opening question period.

In the hours before the Carney-Poilievre faceoff, Government House Leader Steve MacKinnon was daring Conservatives to drop their sloganeering, in what was obviously an effort to show that Poilievre wasn’t going to change much at all.

“From what he’s been saying, the lyrics might have changed but the music stays the same. Three-word slogans so far and a lot of angry rhetoric,” MacKinnon told reporters as the Commons was stirring back to life after the summer break.

Carney, for his part, is striking the bemused posture he adopted against Poilievre when the two leaders last tangled on a public stage, during the spring election’s leaders’ debates. He smiles, laughs at his own partisan jibes, and has rubbed off the must of the earnest edge that got tired on that side of the House after a decade of Liberal rule.

They’re still boasting of their achievements, maintaining that Canada is already seeing the results of a re-energized Liberal regime.

Conservatives are having none of that, unsurprisingly, arguing, with some evidence, that Canadians still have the same or worse affordability problems they had before Carney took the helm.

To be clear, nothing that gets uttered in question period is going to change grocery or housing costs, but if Monday’s fall debut is any indication, affordability is the issue we can expect to dominate the daily theatre of federal politics.

That tracks completely with what Liberals were told by a pollster at their cabinet retreat and what the surveys keep saying. Donald Trump and his tariffs may have consumed the spring election campaign, but domestic issues have edged out that existential crisis.

Trump and tariffs weren’t totally absent from the resumption of public political combat in Ottawa, but the charge now from the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois is that Carney is doing too little after promising much.

That gave Carney an opening to reveal yet another conversation he’s had recently with Trump — over the weekend, when they discussed matters related to Ukraine, Russia and China. These conversations — apparently “unofficial,” so not announced before or after the fact — are how the two are doing business. Presumably things will remain this opaque until they have something to declare.

“The U.S. president is a modern man,” Carney said when Bloc Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet accused him of being too reclusive on the Canada-U.S. front. “I speak with him regularly. We send each other text messages.”

This may have been the only scrap of news produced in the resumption of parliamentary theatre. But no one with any memory of question periods in the recent past would have gone there looking for news on Monday.

This was a chance to see how Carney and Poilievre are going to deal with each other in the weeks and months ahead, and where each thinks the other’s vulnerabilities lie. Both are clearly banking on the idea that Canadians wanted change and that their opponent is failing to deliver it.

They’re not wrong about the desire for change. Canadians, the pollsters keep telling us, don’t want business as usual as a response to a world in constant turmoil. The same turmoil, though, sets up a tension that dominated the last election, between change and a desire for stability.

If that tension still exists in Canada today, the opening question period captured it. Everyone is trying to be different — to a degree — but when it comes to performing the theatre of politics, everyone can’t help being a bit of the same.