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Driving through Calgary, with its endless blue signs and thumbs-ups, it would be easy for the UCP to get overconfident, but Kenney is constantly trying to fight complacency.

“We’ve gotta work hard in the last week,” he tells the volunteers in suburban south Calgary. “We didn’t see it coming in 2015. These guys could get in again.”

Maybe it’s the adrenaline from the campaign, or the rewards of his punishing Keto diet — a severely low-carb regimen — that has allowed him to slim down remarkably, but Kenney keeps finding a second, or third, or fourth wind as the campaign winds down. In contrast, weary staffers are counting the days until they can sleep in their own beds.

This election is about jobs, pipelines and the economy, Kenney says at every stop, and just about everyone agrees. For those few remaining Albertans who can be swayed and who may believe the NDP has been dealt a bad economic hand with plummeting oil prices and an impossibly complicated pipeline approval process, it’s about how much you believe in Rachel Notley.

Photo by Todd Korol/Bloomberg

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Notley’s team, for its part, is pushing hard through the last weekend. Lethbridge on Thursday. Friday, a speech in Calgary, then off to Canmore and a series of whistle stops on the campaign trail.

Around 10 a.m., the van rolls out, through downtown Calgary, to the first stop of the day. The mood, considering the grind, is upbeat. There are Girl Guide cookies in the van, though someone’s put back the empty box of non-mint cookies. Taped to the inside of the door is a printout of Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones; it’s for inspiration on a campaign that is described, basically, as an episode of Veep.