Whatever we all said about this election campaign being a surprise contest of issues and ideas is now off.

Days before the Christmas ceasefire, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper are back to their old form of exchanging insults and ugliness, this time over national unity.

It had been expected of course that the nastiness of the last Parliament would resume in the final three weeks of the campaign after Christmas.

So the current acrimony is bound to accelerate. And that prompts a question of whether the Jan. 23 election campaign will wake up public indifference.

Since the beginning of the campaign the polls have only changed incrementally for all parties except the NDP, which has fallen severely. The polls are showing undecided voters still near 20%.

Now the media are showing disinterest as well. In the fourth week of the campaign, coverage of the campaign is moving off the front pages after last week’s debates seemed to have no impact at all on party standings.

As a result, pursuit of the undecided voter will likely be key to the outcome, according to Nik Nanos, president of the Ottawa-based polling company, SES Research.

SES has found that undecided voters are far more likely to be female (57% female versus 43%male). The less older the undecided voters are the less likely they are to vote at all.

At first blush, this may be bad news for the Conservatives since female voters have been far more likely to be nervous with Harper and his party.

But it also could indicate female voters are having second thoughts about Martin and the Liberals or even the NDP.

With the campaign shaping up to be a contest of the ignored, we likely have an explanation why both the Liberals and Conservatives have willingly wondered into the dangerous territory of national unity/constitutional affairs.

In fact, Harper seems primed to morph the unity issue into a debate on the role of the federal government. With his minimalist philosophy, Harper would be taking an even bigger risk because voters today, particularly in urban areas, have been tending to believe in government again as they did in the 1970s.

But then again, Harper probably feels he has little to lose. The Conservative leader spent the first three weeks running a clean campaign that was greatly improved from 2004. Yet the Liberal lead in the polls has hardly budged.

Perhaps, once Canadians have had enough of shopping malls and Christmas cheer, their attention will shift to the election trail. That could add a missing dynamic.

In the meantime, public indifference and the weather remain wild cards in the Great Winter Campaign of 2005-06.