The two local Conservative candidates, Todd Doherty and Bob Zimmer, opened their Prince George campaign office Wednesday. Zimmer is a lock to retain his hold on Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies while Doherty, the hand-picked successor of Dick Harris, is the front runner in the Conservative stronghold of Cariboo-Prince George.
This is the prevailing wisdom, of course. The Conservatives have their "bedrock of support," a stereotypical phrase used to describe largely rural Western Canadian ridings like these two.
That's the way it's always been, that's the way it always will be.
Or not.
Canada is undergoing rapid change and this region is part of that transformation.
As Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson explain in their book The Big Shift, Stephen Harper's Conservatives arrived at just the moment when Ontario and Quebec lost their hold as the power base of Canada. The federal Liberals didn't see it coming and then refused to believe it was happening until it was too late. Power and wealth has shifted to the west, while Ontario eastward is a group of have-not provinces in need of transfer payments.
Conservative strategists also seized on the internal changes happening in Central Canada and forged a new path to power. Quebec and the Maritimes were all but abandoned in favor of seizing the majority of seats from Sudbury west, along with key ridings in Vancouver and Greater Toronto with large immigrant populations.
Historically, those new Canadians, primarily from Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent, trended Liberal but the Conservatives realized these folks were actually social and fiscal conservatives with traditional beliefs around low taxes, hard work and deference to family, religion and authority.
For Harper to retain his majority in this election, he needs to hold onto his gains in places like Surrey and Richmond, Markham and Scarborough (what Ontario residents call "the 905," the suburban residents outside of the central Toronto 416 area code).
Meanwhile, the core support the Conservatives have enjoyed in rural and Western Canada for generations is softening.
The historic bread-and-butter political stance for the Conservatives has been over Western alienation, that disconnect residents of Calgary and Vancouver, Prince Albert and Prince George, felt from Ottawa and the Liberal elite - political, financial and intellectual - that ran from Windsor through to Quebec City. Brian Mulroney's failure to bring in the West during his reign as prime minister fed the rise of the Reform Party and the eventual rewriting of the right-wing agenda by the Calgary school, led by its star pupil Harper, himself an outcast of Central Canadian intellectual snobbery.
After 10 years of Harper in charge, Western alienation is gone and so is the long-gun registry. Going forward, however, the federal Conservatives and their historic geographical base seem to be going in opposite directions. Increasingly, even small-c conservative Western Canadians are concerned about the environment, worried about climate change, suspicious of big business, don't favor unlimited resource development just for the sake of a few jobs, reject increased power for police and surveillance and want the freedom to smoke pot or end their lives when and as they wish. Meanwhile, the Conservatives under Harper adamantly oppose, in whole or part, each of these somewhat libertarian sentiments.
When Harper can't get along with Christy Clark and Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall, never mind the new NDP premier in Alberta, political winds are shifting.
A decade ago, political watchers thought the Conservatives were crazy for trying to unlock those Liberal strongholds in suburban Vancouver and Toronto until the unimaginable happened. Now, the opportunity is there, more likely for the NDP than the Liberals, to forge into Western Canada, painting themselves as the best place to park their protest vote against those big business pandering Conservatives who've forgotten their Tim Hortons roots.
Neither the NDP nor the Liberals have invested enough time, money and effort in this region to have an impact yet, meaning Zimmer and Doherty can likely rest easy this time around. But in 2019, especially if the NDP or the Liberals get busy in central B.C. during another four more years of Harper, don't be surprised to see the Conservative bedrock in this region turn to sand.
