MACLEOD: Federal Conservatives are losing their most loyal voters

The federal Conservatives have apparently decided that Alberta needs another lecture about Canada. Parkland MP Dane Lloyd has launched Conservatives for Canada, specifically targeting Alberta voters ahead of October 19. “The answer is not for Alberta to leave Canada,” Lloyd says. “The answer is change in Ottawa.” Pierre Poilievre has gone considerably further, declaring that all Conservative MPs will campaign for Canadian unity in Alberta. The federal Conservatives depend enormously on Alberta while pursuing a national electoral strategy that repeatedly requires them to subordinate Alberta's interests to voters elsewhere.Now they are organizing against a substantial portion of their own political base. They may be making a serious mistake in Alberta, and I am beginning to wonder whether they understand it at all.A recent Calgary Guy post on X captured a sentiment I am hearing more often among supporters of independence. Responding to the federal Conservative campaign against Option 2, he wrote: “At this point I’ll likely stay home or vote PPC or independent.” In another post he added: “We are no longer willing to support do-nothing conservatives whether provincial or federal.”.I understand precisely what he means because I have reached much the same conclusion. I have voted Conservative federally for decades. At this point, I see little reason to vote in another federal election at all. That is the danger the Conservative Party should be thinking about.Stephanie Kusie may have given away more than she intended when she said the new organization would speak directly to the 1.4 million Albertans who voted Conservative in 2025. Exactly. Those are the people they should be worried about alienating..It does not presently appear, if you believe the polls, that Alberta has a majority in favour of independence. Recent polls range considerably depending on wording, interpretation, and audience, with August surveys putting Option 2 between 22% and 33%. Angus Reid's August poll had 33% supporting commencement of the legal process and 61% remaining in Canada. Léger subsequently measured Option 2 at 23%.But look at who the independence supporters are.Spark Insights found that 88% of committed “separatists” were UCP voters and 77% were federal Conservative voters. Abacus found something similar: among Albertans who strongly supported independence, 79% intended to vote Conservative federally.These are not Liberal voters the Conservatives are lecturing. They are overwhelmingly people from their own political family. That changes the calculation entirely.The conventional assumption is that an angry Alberta Conservative ultimately comes home. He may curse Ottawa, complain about equalization, threaten independence, swear at the television, and then dutifully mark an X beside the Conservative candidate because, after all, what is the alternative? That assumption may be wearing a bit thin..The 222 Minutes post represents the anger, frustration, and growing realization of Alberta’s permanently subordinate position in Canada. The Calgary Guy post represents a different reaction: withdrawal. Stay home. Vote independent. Vote PPC. Stop donating. Stop volunteering. Stop buying memberships. Stop treating the Conservative Party of Canada as Alberta's vehicle in Ottawa. Because it clearly is not..I suspect that sentiment is much more consequential than whether a few thousand independence supporters actually switch parties.I am one of them. I no longer believe Alberta can meaningfully influence who governs Canada, so why should I continue participating in the futile ritual of electing another opposition Conservative MP by an enormous margin?The 2025 election perfectly illustrates the frustration. Alberta gave the Conservatives 1,436,392 votes — 63.5% of all ballots cast — and 34 of 37 MPs. Those Alberta MPs constituted almost one-quarter of the entire 144-member Conservative caucus. Canada still elected another Liberal government.Diminishing Conservative support would initially have little effect in much of rural Alberta, as they continue to win by wide margins. But it may have serious consequences in Calgary and Edmonton.Using the official 2025 Elections Canada results, consider how many Conservative voters could simply have stayed home before several Conservative-held urban ridings would have been lost, assuming everybody else's vote remained unchanged:.Those are not projections. They are simple arithmetic based on the 2025 results. Calgary McKnight, for example, was won by only 1,317 votes. If barely one Conservative voter in sixteen had stayed home, the Liberals would have won. Calgary Centre could have flipped if fewer than one-in-eleven Conservative voters disappeared..Now put those numbers beside the polling. In Spark's research, 77% of committed “separatists” were federal Conservative voters. Abacus found 79% of strong independence supporters backing the CPC. Nobody can predict how many will ultimately react as Calgary Guy has, or as I have, and decide they are finished with federal Conservative politics. But the Conservatives do not need to lose all of them. In a handful of urban ridings, losing only a small fraction could be enough.There are already broader warning signs. This is what the recent 222 Minutes argument gets basically right. Federal Conservatives cannot indefinitely assume the West will supply an enormous bloc of seats, money, volunteers, and votes, while the party's real path to government depends on appealing to voters elsewhere.The Conservative Unity Campaign tells us to change Ottawa. We have already tried that, many times. Albertans elected Conservatives by landslides through the Trudeau years. We delivered Stephen Harper. We delivered nearly every available Alberta seat to Andrew Scheer, Erin O’Toole, and Pierre Poilievre. In 2025, almost two-thirds of Alberta voters backed the CPC.Mark Carney became Prime Minister anyway.So when federal Conservative MPs now arrive to tell independence supporters that the solution is simply to elect Conservatives and change Ottawa, some of us might reasonably ask: How many more times would you like us to try?That is the point Ottawa Conservatives appear to be missing. The danger is not that thousands of Alberta independence supporters suddenly become Liberals. The danger is that they stop supporting and voting for the CPC. Some will support an Alberta-first federal party if one emerges. Some will vote PPC or independent. Some will concentrate entirely on provincial politics and the independence movement. And some of us may simply stop voting in federal elections altogether.For decades, the Conservative Party could safely assume Alberta Conservatives had nowhere else to go. They may now be discovering another possibility. We don't have to go anywhere. We can just stop showing up.

MACLEOD: Federal Conservatives are losing their most loyal voters

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