VANCOUVER - The war rooms of the major parties in the election campaign run on a volatile mixture of testosterone, caffeine and sleep deprivation, says a former war-room vet.

They've inundated reporters with dozens of emails daily whose tone and subject matter sometimes descend to trivial, even juvenile levels.

They've also been stunningly effective, helping take out candidates from all the major parties by mining gaffes long past and embarrassing back-stories.

Soldiers in the Liberal war room notched a victory Tuesday when a Conservative speech writer fell on his sword, admitting parts of a 2003 speech on the Iraq war he wrote for then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper were lifted wholesale from one given by Australia's prime minister.

The plagiarism was unearthed by Liberal researchers toiling in the party's campaign headquarters.

Work like that gets grudging admiration, even from an old warrior on the other side of the battle line.

While decrying theirs as a weak campaign effortTom Flanagan, who presided over the Tory war room the previous two elections, saidthe Liberals still excel at putting research to work.

"Their ability to conduct and use opposition research, I think, is still as good as ever and that's probably helped save them to some extent," said Flanagan, once a key Harper adviser.

But whether the coup influences the ultimate outcome of the election in two weeks is another question.

"What a war room is supposed to be doing is incrementally affecting the coverage of their candidate and the other side's candidate over a period of time," said Warren Kinsella, who ran the Liberal war room for Jean Chretien's successful campaigns and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's re-election bid last year.

"What I always tell the young people I work with is there is no silver bullet. There's no scandal, there's no single thing that we can do that will win this election."

The tit-for-tat warfare has been largely between the Liberals and Conservatives.

"We don't let any attacks go unanswered," said NDP communications director Brad Lavigne. "When we get hit by the Liberal party's war room, we respond in kind but it's fairly rare that we'll initiate something against them because they're not our target, Mr. Harper is."

The major parties' war rooms are set up pretty much the same - teams of people monitoring banks of TVs and scanning newspapers, researchers trolling the web and writers generating news releases that land in reporters' mail boxes every few minutes.

They're staffed largely by men, though Jenni Byrne, a staffer from the prime minister's office, helps supervise the Tory war room.

That may account for the frat-boy mentality behind the Tories' pooping puffin web page that marked the first week of their campaign.

"It really does get a bit too much on the testosterone scale," said Kinsella. "I do find when you have some smart women in there saying, 'Hey, can we cool it and think about this,' it really has a levelling effect."

Across their ideological gulf, Flanagan and Kinsella agree war rooms can get caught up in the daily firefight.

"There's a risk that you get caught up in the warlike atmosphere of the war room," said Flanagan. "We tried to combat that last time ... I had the responsibility to sign off on everything that went out. I was sort of the final checkpoint."

The famously ruthless Kinsella recalled instances where the war rooms stopped battling for voters' hearts and minds through the media and just started Blackberrying each other.

Sometimes the exchanges seem just silly. After the Conservatives issued a news release last week noting the Liberal election platform had the word Quebec only four times, the Grits dug out the Tories' 2006 platform to point out Quebec showed up there only four times.

The release was pre-emptive, said Liberal campaign co-chair Mark Marissen, to avoid negative reporting of the Tory attack.

But Kinsella said war-room operatives often feel the need to be doing something.

"They're like crack addicts," he said. "If they've gone an hour without something on Canada NewsWire they start to get fidgety."

The insiders admit the growth of web-based reporting and the increasing numbers of independent bloggers has spurred the rising volume of war-room material and speeded up response time.

Journalists ignore much of the daily deluge.

"If I were a reporter I'd probably discard about 90 per cent of what the war rooms put out," said Flanagan. "We were releasing I suppose 15 or 20 products a day (in 2006).

"A lot of it turned out to be trivial or not picked up. But that leaves 10 per cent or so, just as a guess, that actually do become influential."

Often it's not aimed at traditional media. Bloggers have become not only sources of information but also outlets for unfiltered party material.

But while the method and speed of delivery has changed, the tactic of dishing dirt on opponents is as old as electoral politics, notes Paul Knox, chairman of Ryerson University's School of Journalism.

The media have to learn to triage the flow and rigorously investigate claims.

"I don't see it stopping because somewhere in that haystack there's going to be a needle that both is verifiable when you check it out and relevant to the campaign," he said.

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