CALGARY – The long stranglehold conservative parties have held over most prairie rural, and all Alberta rural, seats is as much a defensive response by rural voters as it is a vote for positive programs, says a University of Calgary political analyst.
David Taras, director of the faculty of communication and culture, said Sept. 19 the Conservative party can be confident that the rural West will remain loyal on voting day Oct. 14. 
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Many rural voters will expect the Conservatives to fulfil promises to abolish the long gun registry and to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.
But what they really want through strong representation in a Conservative government is protection from what they consider destructive policies that could be imposed by parties with little western awareness, said Taras.
“What rural Alberta gets by being loyal to the Conservatives is a defence,” he said. “There won’t be a National Energy Program. They won’t have destructive environmental or economic policies imposed. It is an insurance policy and if you are at the table (in caucus), you will be listened to.”
However, Taras said Conservative leader Stephen Harper runs a risk of alienating the West in the longer term as he pursues his policy of turning the old Reform party into a centrist Conservative party that appeals to voter-rich Eastern Canada. It is a delicate balancing act as old as Confederation.
Brian Mulroney’s two-term majority coalition of western conservatives and Quebec nationalists is a historical lesson. In 1993, it blew apart and a majority party was reduced to two MPs, none from the West that had been a Conservative stronghold since John Diefenbaker’s ascent in the 1950s.
“If Harper reconstructs the old Mulroney coalition of the West, suburban Ontario and nationalist Quebec, it is a toxic mix that may work for awhile but has the seeds of its own destruction,” Taras said. “As Harper moves to the centre, prairie populists begin to churn. If populists don’t see their own reflection when they look at the government, in the long run they begin to look around.”
Taras said that is why Harper and his Conservatives continue to spend political capital on traditional Reform issues such as CWB and Senate reform as well as the gun registry.
“These are issues that will remind the old Reform base that despite the journey into more centrist policies and rubbing shoulders with Quebec nationalists they once opposed, their issues have not been forgotten.”
He said it could mean that a rural Conservative Alberta MP is due for a promotion if the Conservatives win government again Oct. 14.
Monte Solberg, the long-term Medicine Hat MP and cabinet minister with a strong rural base, did not run again and that leaves all Alberta cabinet ministers with an urban base.
“I think having a rural-based minister in a Conservative government with such strong rural support does matter so that that constituency does not feel displaced or neglected,” said Taras.
