They should give up Quebec and work for the other 231 seats, with any Quebec votes being considered a bonus. Quebecois will never vote for anyone with a leader outside of Quebec, you are correct.
I am a Conservative Party Member, and a Reform/Alliance member before that. In fact I was elected as a delegate for this weekends convention but couldn't go because of work commitments.
I say this as a true blue-tory conservative, we will never win with a socially ceonservative agenda. Only a libertarian agenda will get us a win. After all that is true conservatism.
Why? Because people in Canada care more about same-sex rights than they do about the immoral GST or the obscene federal gas tax that isn't used to actually fix our third-worldesqe roads.
We need to get government out of peoples lives. Tax Cuts will then come by themselves. Most people realize that social conservatives and socialist liberals are two sides of the same coin, they both think you're too stupid to handle your own affairs in a rational manner. That is at the heart of the Canadian nanny-state.
It is wacky social conservative politics that is killing us. It's all about the economy at the end.