An 11-week campaign did more to frustrate gimmicks than fuel them

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The words were more shrill, but it was the political body language that described the last weekend of the campaign.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was going hoarse bopping from province to province, even holding last-day events in Calgary and Edmonton. Stephen Harper was pictured in a family photo with Doug and Rob Ford, a memento of a Saturday night rally in Toronto, and worked his way to a last stop in Abbotsford, B.C., a riding his party won in 2011 with a whopping 67 per cent of the vote.

And Tom Mulcair was in downtown Toronto, standing in front of a crowd waving orange "Stop Harper" signs, but railing against Mr. Trudeau. His supporters want to oust the Conservatives, but on the final day, a big part of the NDP Leader's task was rallying them to hold back the Liberals.

The get-out-your-voters endgame comes with a poker tell, because it means focusing your message on those willing to vote for you. And Mr. Harper and Mr. Mulcair betrayed that the last weekend was about scrambling to catch Mr. Trudeau. But by this morning, that's over for the leaders.

Now it's about campaign machines getting supporters to the polls. And for each leader, there's at least a little queasy feeling of doubt about what voters, now in control, will do – just as it should be.

There have been 78 days of partisan sniping, pandering, gimmicks and relentless ads exhausting voters in an election campaign that often felt nasty, brutish and long. But it was an unusually good campaign for Canadian democracy.

The 11-week campaign did more to frustrate the gimmicks than fuel them. Attempts to raise knee-jerk reactions were less effective over time. The niqab? NDP strategists say the Conservatives' sudden gambit to ban it at citizenship ceremonies, and possibly in the civil service, clobbered them in Quebec. But polls show the results weren't straightforward – it sparked a scattering of fragile NDP support, including to another party against the niqab ban, the Liberals.

Many issues rolled to the top. There was the economy, but two weeks of Mike Duffy's trial as the talk of August, too. A technical recession sharpened debate over stimulus spending versus balanced budgets. A picture of a dead toddler sparked a wave of concern over Canada's response to Syrian refugees. And Liberal campaign co-chair Dan Gagnier's final-week resignation for advising a company on lobbying a new government. All made waves, but none dominated, as voters sifted them over time.

And the three main parties were each measured seriously, too – weeks of a close three-way race meant each really was a potential government. Many voters, 60 per cent at the start, long considered two or more parties.

The ads were indeed relentless. Spending limits were twice the norm, more than $50-million for each major party. The Conservatives hoped the long campaign would give them a money edge. But it also made it harder to maintain the edge they'd already gained from precampaign advertising, when they tagged Mr. Trudeau as "just not ready." Five leaders' debates, starting 10 weeks before the vote, allowed voters to compare against expectations. That appears to have aided Mr. Trudeau, but it might have gone another way – the narrative was harder to control.

There were also cheap shots and misinformation and vague dodges, but those weren't innovations. Parties still felt they had to issue a full platform, with costing, of a kind you won't see in U.S. campaigns. And for all their failings, the parties offered a debate on different, but not radically different, directions: Mr. Harper's classic Conservative platform of keeping taxes and spending low; Mr. Trudeau called for stimulus spending on infrastructure and middle-class tax cuts to boost the economy; and Mr. Mulcair offered a gradual march, within balanced budgets, to expanded social programs such as national child care and pharmacare.

Then there was Mr. Harper versus the desire for change, the driving force, some of it visceral. Mr. Harper fought it, arguing his opponents are risky and costly. Voters had time to weigh Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau against each other, and the risks. The long, torturous campaign allowed the voters to assess more than just the leaders' latest scramble, even if the leaders had to keep scrambling to the end.