It was supposed to be an Orange Tsunami, a crushing wave of New Democratic Party (NDP) members of parliament with their trademark orange banners sweeping aside Canada’s traditional parties - the Conservatives and the Liberals - for a brighter, more equal future.
Instead, as Canadians prepare to cast their ballots on Monday, it’s shaping up to be a photo-finish final dash between the newly resurgent Liberals led by Justin Trudeau and the incumbent Conservatives led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with perhaps neither party capturing enough votes to form a majority government.
And NDP leader Tom Mulcair could end up being the big loser of Canada’s longest-ever election campaign. His left-wing party continues to lose steam nationally and in the French-speaking province of Quebec, where the NDP drew most of its support during the last election in 2011, unseating the Liberals to become the official opposition in the House of Commons.
Mulcair, a feisty 60-year-old former Quebec environment minister of mixed Irish and French-Canadian ancestry, has fought his campaign on a message of “true change”.
He has run on a promise to introduce a national childcare system, invest heavily in public transportation, education and Aboriginal communities, abolish Canada’s unelected Senate, commit Canada to drastically lower its greenhouse gas emissions and end Ottawa’s military campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Canada is taking part in the US-led bombing campaign of Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, and Canadian special forces train Iraqi and Kurdish fighters.
In a very unusual step for a party with strong social-democratic credentials, Mulcair also promised to do all that while also keeping a balanced budget.
Trudeau, 43, the eldest son of former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, on the other hand, is promising to run three consecutive deficits of a “modest” 10bn Canadian dollars (US$7.8bn) a year each to kickstart the sputtering Canadian economy.
Harper is campaigning on a traditional Conservative platform of balancing the budget, tax cuts for the middle class and security both at home and internationally.
It has been a difficult slog for the 56-year-old Conservative leader whose 10-year stint as prime minister coincided with the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression and led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
Even more troubling for Harper, whose political support is based in oil- and gas-rich Western Canada, has been the steep decline in oil prices and other commodities that were fuelling Canada’s growth until recently.
Harper has had to fend off attacks from his political rivals who have labelled him the prime minister “with the worst job creation record since the Great Depression” and savaged him on Canada’s slow response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
But a master tactician, Harper has been able to stay afloat by introducing campaign issues that have kept his rivals on their heels.