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The Conservatives are hoping they are seeing a rebound in Ontario, but in Quebec, once seen as the path to Stephen Harper's majority, their battle now is to minimize the losses.

The Conservatives entered this campaign believing they could take huge numbers of seats from the Bloc Québécois.

Now, after a series of missteps that contributed to the impression that Mr. Harper's Tories don't understand Quebec voters, many Quebec Conservatives privately say the question now is how many of their 11 seats in the province they will lose.

And a number are blaming it on the tight circle of aggressive Quebec strategists, drawn from provincial Action Démocratique du Québec party.

“We're no longer in the era where we're talking about making gains,” sighed one disheartened Conservative working on the Quebec campaign.

A Segma poll published in La Presse indicated the Bloc Québécois voter popularity is at 42 per cent, with the Tories at 20, which, according to the pollster, suggests they could lose five of their 11 seats. A separate GPS survey of eight swing ridings had the Tories losing in all eight, including three they hold.

The Conservatives' slide in Quebec began before the global financial crisis shook their fortunes elsewhere.

Just over two weeks into the campaign, a storm of controversy over government cuts to arts and culture programs and Mr. Harper's stiff-sentence plan for youth justice combined to create the impression that the Conservatives were just not in touch with Quebec sentiment.

Culture might mean cocktails and galas in English Canada, one Quebec Conservative said, but in Quebec it means identity.

“It wasn't the policies themselves. It was what they symbolized,” said Sherbrooke University political scientist Jean-Herman Guay, noting they were relatively minor in scope.

Many Quebeckers had wanted to vote Conservative, believing that Mr. Harper's recognition of Quebeckers as a nation symbolized a new type of federalism in Ottawa, he said. But the missteps, and all-out attacks of Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, combined to persuade many their attitude was foreign.

“They messed it up, and for what?” Mr. Guay said. “I don't know who they were trying to please.”

Inside Conservative circles in Quebec, many blame a small group of Conservatives drawn from the ADQ, notably Quebec war room chief Michel Lalonde and Mr. Harper's press secretary and Quebec adviser, Dimitri Soudas.

Some Quebec Conservatives complain that circle is more right-wing than most Quebeckers, and too close-knit – and they failed to see that some proposals, or at least the rhetoric around them, would clang in Quebeckers' ears as too far right or even American-style.

And some, even ADQ supporters, say that the ADQ-Tory alliance alienated the provincial Liberals – and Jean Charest's campaign blasts at Mr. Harper's party helped fuel the damage.

The issue of whether the culture cuts might cause problems in Quebec had already been raised in August meetings of the Conservatives' campaign team, but the Quebec strategists insisted that while it might bother Montreal's chattering classes, it wouldn't upset the suburbanites in the 450 area code around the city, one Tory strategist said.

“The question was raised. The Quebec team discussed it. They said, no, no, no, in the 450, people don't care about that,” the strategist said.

What they didn't see was that for the traditional Bloc supporters, who invariably react to perceived threats from Ottawa – they call themselves a guard dog – it was the gift of provocation, he said. The youth-justice plan that could give teens life sentences was susceptible to criticisms that the Tories were importing U.S.-style crime policies.

“We showed them a robber so the guard dog could be awakened,” the strategist said.