Just west of Quebec City, and just east of Resume Speed, lies the sleepy town of St. Agapit, where Stephen Harper delivered a slashing partisan speech last week, with both Stéphane Dion and Gilles Duceppe squarely in his sights.

Why would the prime minister spend an evening where the highway through town is also called Rue Principale? Because towns like St. Agapit are part of the Conservative hopes to grow from minority to majority status at the next election.

It’s called their 418 strategy, after the area code for Quebec City and eastern Quebec. This is where the Conservatives established their Quebec beachhead in 2006, and have since emerged as the competitive alternative to the Bloc Québécois.

There are more seats in the 418 than in the 514 phone code on the island of Montreal, the last Liberal stronghold in the province, and the 418’s seats are a lot more available to the Conservatives. The voters in the 418 are an extremely homogenous “pool of accessibles.” They are predominantly small-town or rural, overwhelmingly francophone, and almost exclusively white.

In the choir of 100 or people arranged behind Harper for the St. Agapit photo op, there wasn’t a single non-white face. For that matter, the speech audience of 1,500 wasn’t exactly an advertisement for the Bouchard-Taylor commission’s recommendations about inter-culturalism. But the people here vote, and they tend to vote together, so that when one seat in the 418 falls, most of them tend to fall in the same direction.

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