This is a special Canada Letter for the 2019 Canadian election. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Monday night brought the first official debate of this years campaign, an event largely marked by the six leaders talking over one another. After cycling back home well into the evening from the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, home of the debates, I was up before dawn the next morning for a very particular election experience.

On Tuesday, the traveling roadshow that is Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus campaign dropped into Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, for a few hours. Its probably not a tour experience anyone will soon offer the general public.

As the election enters its final phase, polls suggest that neither Mr. Trudeau nor Andrew Scheer, the Conservative leader, have managed to change voters views in any significant ways, at least when it comes to the popular vote. As they were at the beginning, the two parties and their leaders are deadlocked in a tie.

So this has become an every-seat-counts kind of election. (A reminder for non-Canadian readers: Canadians will not vote for a party or prime minister on Oct. 21. They are electing 338 local members of Parliament.) Nunavut, all 2 million square kilometers of it, is just a single electoral district. The Liberals won it in 2015 and clearly hope to repeat that. Tuesday was Mr. Trudeaus third trip to Nunavut in a year.

Not only is the contingent of reporters who follow Mr. Trudeau and the other leaders around considerably smaller than in the past, its now almost entirely made up of journalists from television networks. Mr. Trudeaus staff told me that reporters and columnists from Canadian newspapers have floated in and out. But a reporter for The Canadian Press news service and I were the only representatives of what event organizers now call print and digital media on the Iqaluit outing.

Like any day on the Liberal campaign, journalists, or more precisely their employers, paid 1,000 Canadian dollars to come along.

Mr. Trudeaus campaign planes have attracted unusual attention this election. First a bus carrying reporters unwisely tried to drive under the wing of one of the planes, damaging it. Then, the Conservatives charged that having two planes undermines Mr. Trudeaus climate change agenda. The Liberals shot back by noting that they buy carbon offsets, while the Conservatives do not.

For reasons no one could explain, we flew to Iqaluit on the Boeing 737-200 usually used by Mr. Trudeaus advance team to move around equipment rather than the one with giant red TRUDEAU banners painted on its sides. I was told by other journalists that the decorated plane is quite nice. As for our aircraft, there are good reasons its called the cargo plane, although its lack of storage space was only matched by an extraordinary lack of leg room.

While several of Mr. Trudeaus aides and his children Ella-Grace and Xavier wandered back to where journalists and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sat, the prime minister didnt budge from his seat until we landed, three hours after taking off in Ottawa. From an overhead bin, he retrieved a special Nunavut campaign parka, which was overkill given the 5-degree-Celsius temperature.

In 2015, the successful Liberal candidate was Hunter Tootoo who was named fisheries minister by Mr. Trudeau. But an alcohol problem and a messy affair, in which Mr. Tootoo was said to have had relationships with a young female staffer and her mother at the same time, led to his removal from the cabinet and the Liberal caucus.

This time around, the Liberal candidate is Megan Pizzo-Lyall, a former Iqaluit city councilor who is now operations manager for an Inuit investment company. She is facing Leona Aglukkaq, the Conservative who held the district for two terms and had several cabinet posts in Stephen Harpers government.

Mr. Trudeaus agenda included events clearly designed to boost Ms. Pizzo-Lyalls campaign, including a visit to an Inuit seniors center where one woman recalled meeting him as a child when he had accompanied his father, the former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, to the community. Two other women, however, continued with their card game.

But the trip also allowed Mr. Trudeau to use the stunning and thats understating it scenery of Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park as a backdrop for cameras as he spoke to a national audience about his governments record on the environment and curbing carbon change in particular. The reporters questions? They were mainly focused on the debate.

Along the way, he worked a small crowd that included a grade 10 high school class and received a plastic bag of dried and smoked fish from a woman for the plane ride home.

In an airplane services building at the airport, the reporters and his staff were fed Arctic char panini, something that in an ideal world would be coming to a restaurant near everyone. Three and a half hours after the cargo plane touched down in Iqaluit, it was airborne for Toronto.

Even the vastness of Canadas Arctic, however, provided no relief from the comparative smallness of the countrys political world. At the Toronto airport, Mr. Trudeaus plane had to taxi up next to Mr. Scheers. And as the two red Liberal buses headed out to a suburban hotel, Mr. Scheers big blue buses were pulling in.

On Oct 17, join Ian Austen and Dan Bilefsky for an election-themed phone conversation about where the parties stand and the issues most important to Canadians. Is this close race at a tipping point? RSVP for the call here, and send your questions to nytcanada@nytimes.com.

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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Justin Trudeau Heads North, Fighting for Every Seat in a Tight Race - The New York Times