Is Justin Trudeau crazy, touting Quebec’s numerical advantage over an under-represented West in the Senate?

Crazy like a fox, perhaps.

Reaction to the Liberal leader’s comments to La Presse last weekend was swift. Trudeau was roundly lambasted for political insensitivity and an obvious Quebec bias.

For those who missed it, Trudeau told the Montreal newspaper he doesn’t favour senate abolition because: “We have 24 senators from Quebec and there are just six from Alberta and six from B.C.… That’s to our advantage.”

Later, when questioned on the controversial remark, the MP for Papineau refused to apologize.

“I’m not going to make apologies for being very serious about protecting minorities in this country, whether they be linguistic minorities like anglophones in Quebec or francophones outside Quebec, or even Quebec as a province.”

Now, taken at face value, there’s no question Trudeau’s remarks show a complete lack of concern for the Western region’s unfairly low representation in the upper house of Parliament.

Quebec, with a population of eight million, has 24 senate seats; B.C. and Alberta, with a joint population of 8.4 million, together have a paltry dozen. It’s a travesty.

As a national leader looking for national support, surely it’s folly to alienate voters in any region of the country. So why would Trudeau utter the comment and then defend it?

Even if he’s naive, the neophyte leader is surrounded by experienced, capable political advisers.

The answer is simple. Trudeau’s first job as leader of the third party is to get his team back into political contention.

To that end, his greatest imperative is to win back voters in the Liberals’ historical stronghold of Quebec, voters who moved en masse in the 2011 election to the Jack Layton-led New Democrats.

Even if Trudeau pulls rabbits out of a hat and walks on water, he’s not going to score big in Western Canada at the time of a 2015 election.

The party always gets creamed in Alberta and won a scant two seats in 2011 in B.C., both in Vancouver. It won one seat in Manitoba, another in Saskatchewan.

Even if Trudeau doubles the Liberals’ seat count in the West, it would add up only to eight MPs.

The leader thus is choosing to focus on Quebec, with 75 seats. He’s betting the situation there is fluid. After all, Quebecers are notoriously fickle and, when they make a move, they do it almost in unison.

When Quebecers decided to dump the Bloc Quebecois, they did so unequivocally — even ditching the party’s once-popular leader Gilles Duceppe. They flocked to the NDP, conferring official Opposition status on it.

Liberals believe Tom Mulcair, while a Quebecer like Trudeau, is a far less endearing politician than Layton.

A mid-April CROP poll for La Presse put the Trudeau-led Liberals in the lead in Quebec with 38-per-cent backing. The party hasn’t seen such support since the days of Pierre Eliott Trudeau. New Democrats were in second place with 30 per cent, the Bloc had 18 per cent and Conservatives, 10 per cent.

“The road to a Liberal renewal runs primarily through Ontario,” observed polling analyst Eric Grenier. “But rebuilding bridges the party burned in Quebec would ensure Trudeau an electoral coalition that would be difficult for the Conservatives to beat, and would tear the NDP’s apart.”