Election day!

Happy Canadian election day! Stephen Harper and the PC Conservative Party of Canada have controlled Parliament for nearly 10 years, although it appears his reign of terror may be coming to a close. This would seem to suggest he’s not handling the pressure particularly well:

Hungry for votes in the Greater Toronto Area, they embraced the populist might of Rob and Doug Ford, welcoming them this week to a campaign event in the Fords’ stomping ground of Etobicoke, arranging to share the spotlight with them on Saturday at a rally for the Prime Minister in Toronto. The brothers’ propensity to share unwelcome thoughts (Rob mused in late August about Doug replacing Stephen Harper, should the Tories lose) mattered not. Nor did Rob Ford’s admission to using crack cocaine while mayor of Toronto. This was Team Blue closing ranks.

So Rob and Doug hit the pavement, cameras in tow, to knock on doors in key swing ridings such as Etobicoke–Lakeshore and Scarborough Centre. “I think we’re doing well out there,” Doug Ford boasted on Tuesday. “We’ve had a really good response.”

Then, within 36 hours, it was all up the spout. On Wednesday evening, Maclean’s posted on its website an excerpt from Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, a book written by Mark Towhey about his time as Rob’s chief of staff at city hall. The passage features a harrowing, damning account of Rob Ford in a screaming match with his wife, Renata, in which he berates and threatens her over drugs, money and, possibly, a gun in their house—all while their children were trying to sleep upstairs. Links to the item quickly spread on social media.

…Harper was customarily clipped in response, saying queries about Towhey’s account should go to “those individuals” involved—apparently, meaning Rob and Renata Ford. He noted, without uttering the Ford name, that the family’s support of the federal Tories is “longstanding and well-known.”

I’m trying to imagine the mindset in which what we knew about Rob Ford wasn’t sufficiently troubling to question the wisdom of signing him up for one’s campaign, and I’m struggling.

At any rate, let’s call this an open thread for the election. I haven’t been paying particularly close attention to the campaign; did the apparent shift in support from the NDP to the Grits in the last few months stem from identifiable campaigning failures on Mulcair’s part, or did voters just get around to remembering the Liberals still exist?