REGINA—As he skipped cities and time zones and made his way back to his political home in Calgary, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper made clear to those around him he was perfectly at ease with whatever outcome would be the result of Monday’s vote.

But even as he tried to project calm, Harper’s voice betrayed notes of frustration as he delivered impassioned stump speeches, and the Conservative campaign was hit with an unexpected blow Sunday.

Benjamin Perrin, Harper’s former lawyer in the PMO, says in a statement that based on what he’s personally seen and experienced, he felt there was no other choice but to abandon his lifelong Conservative vote.

“Last week, I voted in an advance poll for change,” Perrin said in a statement sent to The Canadian Press.

“As a lifelong conservative I never thought that would happen. But after what I’ve personally seen and experienced, there was no other choice. The current government has lost its moral authority to govern.”

Perrin was Harper’s lawyer in the PMO at the time of Nigel Wright’s $90,000 payment to Mike Duffy to cover his inappropriate senate expenses — now the subject of criminal charges against Duffy. Perrin testified in August that Harper’s top aide Ray Novak was in the loop — contrary to Novak’s and Harper’s claim.

It was terrible timing for a campaign team that’s determined to keep its game-face on, assuring reporters the party believes it can win the election.

Novak, one of three top officials in the campaign’s war room in Ottawa, joined Harper’s plane in Toronto for the last leg of this trip, but said little to reporters.

Harper’s quest for a fourth term as prime minister began with him projecting calm leadership, but on Sunday, there was a touch of impatience if not anger in his voice.

Harper warned against voting for Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who has emerged as his main rival on the national scene.

“The Liberal campaign when you cut away all the fancy rhetoric, that’s all it’s really about, turning back the clock to the days where everybody worked for a handful of Liberal special interests,” he told a crowd of about 250 supporters at his first morning rally of the campaign’s final day.

Although their campaign planes at Toronto airport were parked right next to each other on this final sprint, Harper ignored New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair altogether on his last stop in Ontario.

In Regina, however, where Mulcair’s NDP has strong roots, Harper lumped in the NDP with the Liberals.

“The other guys want to take us back to the days where they could get their hands on as much money as possible and spend it on bureaucracy and special interests,” he told a small crowd of about 150 gathered on an airport tarmac for a brief touchdown. The Conservative candidate Tom Lukiwski denied there was any trouble afoot. “Saskatchewan is solid,” he said, adding he expects 13 of 14 seats to go blue.

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Harper’s final campaign journey began Sunday morning in Newmarket, hopscotched across the country to Regina, then Abbotsford, B.C., before it would end in Calgary, the city Harper adopted as a young adult.

It is a place where he owns a house, the place that helped shape many of his core political values, first as a Reform Party policy adviser and MP, later as the leader of its offshoot, the Canadian Alliance, and finally as the founding leader of the modern Conservative party that embodied the Reformer’s cry “The West wants in.”

At each stop along the way, Harper aimed to hammer one last time his political message, although at this late stage the focus was on motivating party workers to not take any votes for granted, as much as inspiring voters to cast a ballot for the Conservatives.

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