Attention all Western Canadians, attention all Conservatives:

I am Torontonian.
I did not vote Conservative.
The fact that the Conservative Party's leader and origins are from the West had absolutely ZERO effect on my choice of whom to vote for.

Let me explain how I decided to vote for a party other than the Conservatives:
I went to the websites of all four parties running candidates in my riding, and I read each party's platform. I compared each party's policy on each issue to all the other parties' policies. For every issue, I decided which party had the best policy, that is the closest to my vision of how Canada should be addressing the issue.

There was not a single issue for which the Conservative Party had the best policy. My reaction when reading the platform ranged from "This is a reasonable policy, but all the other parties have better policies" to "This policy, if implemented, would result in a Canada that I would be ashamed to live in." Even if I did not disagree with a particular Conservative policy, one of the other parties always had a better policy on that particular issue.

As you can see, regionalism had NOTHING to do with my decision not to vote for the Conservatives. It was all about policy. In fact, until these letters started pouring into the nation's op-ed pages, I didn't realize that the Conservatives were considered purveyors of the Western Weltanschauung. I took the Conservative Party to be just that, a conservative party, purveyors of the conservative Weltanschauung. Regionalism was never even a factor.

It isn't about anti-Western sentiment.
It my vote was not intended to slight or spite the West.
It is about policy.
My vote was intended to go to the party whose policies are closest to my vision rather than the party whose policies are furthest from my vision.
My decision about whether to vote Conservative would have been the same if those policies had originated from Jonquiere or Iqualuit or Bonavista or my next door neighbour.

It's all about policies. It is not about regions at all.

PS: If you're going to consider every pronouncement about your party to be a pronouncement about the West, you might want to think about following the lead of your Quebec counterparts and restyling yourselves as the Western Block.