The coverage I've seen of the Conservative Party policy convention focused on the new, moderate face the party was putting forward.

A question I haven't seen asked is what happened to all the social conservatives and hard-nosed Reformers from the last Alliance configuration that helped populate the Conservatives until, er, Sunday.

How do they like the new, moderate make-over?

Here's an excerpt from Craig Chandler, an unquestionable family-values Christian SoCon, writing on globeandmail.com on March 15:

In 2002, Mr.  (Stephen) Harper became leader of the Canadian Alliance with the support of many social conservatives. In fact, our organization (Concerned Christians Canada, Inc.) brought several supporters to Mr. Harper's side from the camp of his opponent Stockwell Day. The next step was the merger of the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties, of which our organization played a pivotal role. After the merger, social conservatives continued to support Mr. Harper in his bid for the party's leadership. We organized to insure he defeated Belinda Stronach, a well-known liberal who has successfully infiltrated the new Conservative Party of Canada.

In my conversations with Mr. Harper, we would always agree that doing what is right is more important then doing what is popular. We agreed that the objective is getting our conservative principles into power. We agreed that the majority of Canadians are both fiscally and socially conservative and would vote for a leader who would stick to these principles.

Now we fear that Mr. Harper is abandoning these conservative principles - the exact thing he once accused former Reform Party leader Preston Manning of doing. What irony.

Chandler says SoCons were already disillusioned in the last election and stayed home. To re-energize them, he suggests Harper use George W. Bush's strategy of preaching to the hard-right base.

But in using Dubya as a guide, I suspect Mr. Chandler might be in problematic territory.

Our great neighbor to the south is more religious and socially conservative than us.

Bush didn't win by a huge majority, although he took both the Electoral College and a bare majority. I would argue he won in part because Americans don't have a history of tossing their leaders in times of war and because whatever his faults, the public trusted Bush and his team to do a better job of defending the country.

However, it is true that an estimated four million U.S. Christian SoCons sat on their hands on Voting Day in 2000.  Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, vowed that would not happen in 2004.

And instead of losing by 500,000 votes (but winning the Electoral College), Bush won by 3.5 million. Do the math.

I suspect Harper and company realized the damage done to their party by the intemperate statements of candidates such as Cheryl Gallant comparing abortion to the beheading of Nicholas Berg.

Harper's done his best to marginalize those extremists in his party. And in fairness, there are some Liberal SoCons as well. Tom Wappel, for example, holds very strong views on abortion.

However, the genius of the Liberals is those people appear as marginal players within the Grits; with the Conservatives, I suspect the public sees such individuals as speaking for an otherwise silent majority within the party.

The Conservatives' task on the weekend was to refocus themselves as a moderate yet still rightward-leaning party, one that can hold onto its traditional base of support while not appearing scary to those in Ontario and Quebec who think it's the Liberals' turn to sit on the opposition benches for a while.

Will saying no to restricting abortion but yes to keeping marriage "traditional" be enough to keep the SoCons on board? That's a question which remains to be answered.

Lessons from Saskatchewan

About a decade ago, I was doing a magazine piece on the Saskatchewan NDP.

One NDP insider said they shared a similar problem with  conservative parties: Both types had strongly ideological wings with them, and those groups would rather lose on principle than win on compromise.

Politics by its very nature demands compromise, so that creates an instant problem.

But it's the zealots who mostly do the spadework of politics, particularly around election time. And for the Saskatchewan NDP in the 1995 campaign, they had to beg disaffected members to come work for them.

It's true the NDP have stayed in power there, but that's mainly because of an unpalatable conservative party (the Saskatchewan Party), a disgraced one (the Progressive Conservatives, who were mired in a huge scandal in the mid-1990s) and a provincial Liberal Party that implodes every time it thinks it's getting close to power.

I think there's some lessons there for the federal scene. For example, the Saskatchewan Party -- a coalition of provincial Reform/Alliance types, former Tories and right-wing Liberals --  moderated its policies this winter. It also has a more sellable leader in Brad Wall than former Reform MP Elwin Hermanson.

But if the zealots think their desired type of change is unachievable even if their party forms government, that means they either sit on their hands or start up a protest party (the Alberta Alliance, which thinks the Klein regime isn't right-wing enough; the New Green Alliance in Saskatchewan, which didn't think think the Romanow NDP were left-wing enough).

My gut says enough SoCons will grit their teeth and play along with the new policy direction of the federal Tories to make it easy for Harper, but if it doesn't work in 2006 (or whenever the next federal vote happens), expect chaos.

Same holds if the Tories are elected but govern from the centre.