As Quebec election enters final week, how solid is the Liberals’ lead?

A lot of eyes will be on Quebec as the province heads into the last full week of campaigning for the April 7 general election.

Provincial elections in Canada generally pass unnoticed by people outside the jurisdiction where it's held. There'd be a story when the writ is dropped and another when the results are in.

Quebec is the exception. Campaigns there are national news and a lot of Canadians collectively hold their breath as votes are tallied.

That's because no other provincial election potentially can lead to the breakup of the country. It's been that way since the separatist Parti Quebecois first took power in 1976, resulting four years later in a referendum on sovereignty association.

The party during another stint in government came within a hair's breadth of winning a second sovereignty referendum in 1995.

So expect plenty of coverage as the minority PQ government tries to salvage its once promising re-election effort. In the mean time, the Liberals under new leader Phillippe Couillard hope to end the separatist party's 18-month hold on power after it unseated Jean Charest's tired, corruption-tainted Liberal regime in September 2012.

"Basically Couillard will try to keep the ballot question on sovereignty," Globe and Mail reporter Les Perreaux, who's been on the campaign trail, told Yahoo News.

"Marois will keep trying to shift it to two questions: ethics, which encompasses the Liberal record and Couillard's mercenary business life, along with language and identity. I think she's going to have to pick a theme and hammer it."

[ Related: Marois promises to beef up language laws to protect French ]

The incumbent PQ had reason for optimism going into the campaign three weeks ago. Polls showed it with a solid lead – majority territory, even – driven partly by support for the party's controversial values charter proposal among the francophone majority.

The PQ scored what initially looked like a major coup when it recruited as a candidate media billionaire Pierre Karl Peladeau, someone who could demonstrate the statist PQ had support at the top tier of Quebec's business community.

But that move backfired. The Quebecor Inc. boss's declaration he was running to build an independent Quebec for his children derailed the PQ's carefully crafted election strategy. The channel changed from identity to sovereignty and raised the prospect of an unpopular referendum if the PQ win, despite Pauline Marois' assurances there'd be no vote until Quebecers were ready (code for "when we think we can win.").

Peladeau's reputation as a union buster also managed to alienate the party's crucial labour support.

The unwelcome focus on sovereignty continued into the first televised debate, with Premier Marois on the defensive over Peladeau and her own musings about an independent Quebec using the Canadian dollar and keeping its borders with the rest of Canada open.

Polling reflected sudden voter disenchantment as the Liberals surged into the lead, even heading towards majority territory.

The PQ's sense of desperation seemed palpable when it seized on an electoral officer's concerns about voter-eligibility rules to declare the election could be hijacked by students from outside Quebec attending university in the province.

The PQ may have clawed back some ground after the final debate last Thursday. Couillard came under attack from Marois and the leaders of left-wing Quebec Solidaire (QS) and the right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) over past Liberal sins and Couillard's tenuous business connection with Arthur Porter, implicated in an alleged massive fraud related to construction of a new Montreal hospital complex.

Tom Kott of the online news site Prince Arthur Herald said despite the mudslinging the debate focused refreshingly on real issues.

Quebec's endemic problems with corruption in public-sector contracts appeared to touch the PQ, too, as media reports alleged members of the PQ government in the 1990s accepted kickbacks from construction companies.

Of the two smaller parties, neither has a sniff of power but could determine if the province has another minority government. A CBC News poll tracker shows that up to March 25, two days before the final TV debate, their support has solidified.

Fresh post-debate polling will tell us whether the PQ did close the gap with the Liberals.

A vote projection on non-partisan ThreeHundredEight.com based on polling up to last Tuesday put the Liberals eight points up on the PQ at more than 41 per cent, edging just into majority territory. The site's analysis said polls reflect a drop in francophone support for the PQ, particularly outside of Montreal and Quebec City, ominous considering rural Quebec is the party's heartland.

A large Léger poll released last week found that while a majority of Quebecers initially thought the PQ would win, now almost 50 per cent think the Liberals will be victorious.

"The campaign has well and truly shifted," its analysis said. "The campaign has just been a disaster for the PQ."

[ Related: Parti Quebecois targeted as integrity takes centre stage in election ]

Of course polls shouldn't be taken as gospel, especially when the accuracy of increasingly used online surveys has come into question.

Let's not forget pollsters and pundits wrote off the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta's 2012 election before the Tories scored an upset re-election victory over the Wildrose party. Pollsters apparently underestimated how badly gaffes by opposition candidates helped discredit the right-of-centre party.

As La Presse columnist Lysiane Gagnon observed Friday, Liberal strategists probably worry the party's peaked too soon. The PQ still has time to implant concerns that the Liberals under Couillard won't be much different from the Charest government, especially with a number of Charest-era candidates in the running.

It's probably too late in the campaign to refocus on the bread-and-butter issues that were kicked to the side by the debate over ethics, identity, language and sovereignty. But what will seize voters when they enter the polling booth in a week?

"What is clear entering this last stretch of the election is that nothing is clear," writes Kott.

"While Philippe Couillard is ahead in the latest polls, these numbers can change fast. He stood his ground during the debate, but voters watched him play defence while less pressure was put on Premier Pauline Marois’ record.

"It’s anyone’s game come April 7."