With only four days to go to E-Day, and heading into a long weekend, we can give thanks for Stephen Harper’s tumble in the polls over the past week to 10 days. Our great team of election bloggers will be watching and commenting on the campaign right down to the wire.

And, as rabble gets set to relaunch our site, the election blog will stick around for the week following October 14 to help assess the results.

Here are just a few of the highlights from the election blog this week.

Sharon Fraser has a theory on why Canadians are backing away from Harper – it’s the sweater and his whole ham-fisted image overhaul: “I donâe(TM)t care whether Stephen Harper plays the piano, likes hockey or shakes his kidsâe(TM) hands. I have less-than-zero interest in his family. People are surely wondering if those ads are just intended to distract from his not-so-hidden agenda and if heâe(TM)s not-so-subtly just trying to manipulate us. Perhaps this motive is so obvious that voters have been driven to look more closely at what he really represents.”

Meanwhile, despite his best efforts to nullify the issue early in the campaign, Afghanistan was headline news again, with reports that the price tag for Canada’s role in Afghanistan is $18 billion. Steven Staples has been helping to expose the news that Harper hid the true cost of the war: “I was astounded to see that the Budget Officeâe(TM)s findings, when adjusted to use comparable methodologies, are actually much higher than our own results. Therefore the real cost is higher than anyone imagines.”

Pierre Beaudet continued to update us on campaign developments in Quebec, while wondering about the powerful resonance of the Trudeau myth: “It took me a long time to figure it out. Canadians are caught in this terrible distortion called Canadian nationalism. It becomes even harder when they get to the point of thinking that other nationalisms, from Quebec and the First Nations, are the âe~real enemyâe(TM). Trudeau captured that fear and became the hero. There is rarely something progressive in nationalism but when it gets ahold of the dominant nation, it becomes chauvinism and racism.”

Meanwhile, in northern Quebec, the impact of chauvinism was seen in a police attack on Algonquin protesters peacefully blockading Highway 117 to bring attention to their grievances. Dru Oja Jay of The Dominion was there to cover the story: “Are we ready to discuss colonialism in the context of an election? If this happened to anyone else, would it not be national news?”

Bernadette L. Wagner looked for other stories off the mainstream’s radar, taking a tour of what other bloggers across the country were saying as the campaign reaches the homestretch.

Share your opinion by commenting on the election blog or by joining in the discussions on babble. And on Tuesday night, keep an eye on the election blog as we’ll have instant analysis and discussion as we all watch the results come in.