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We have reached the end of the “phoney war” stage of the campaign. From Labour Day on, the parties will be using live ammunition.

That said, it was a surprisingly frisky August: from the revelations at the Mike Duffy trial to last week’s Liberal-NDP policy-swap on the deficit, there was no shortage of electoral fodder for the interested voter to chew on. And the result? The same close three-way race at the end of the month as at the beginning, plus or minus a percentage point or two.

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That doesn’t mean we won’t see bigger shifts in the weeks to come. The parties will have saved their most dramatic gambits, their nastiest “oppo research” for the final six weeks. Moreover, the dynamics of a three-way race, in a highly polarized political environment and with more than 50 per cent of the electorate, according to a Nanos Research poll, undecided, makes for a high degree of fluidity.

The efforts of the parties may in fact be secondary. More important, perhaps, may be the interaction between the polls and strategic voters. Such is the loathing of the Conservatives among the two-thirds of voters who say they want a change of government that we could see a strong last-minute move toward whichever opposition party appeared best placed to defeat them.