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“I’ve just never been so frustrated with the government in my entire life.”

Like many in the West’s rural areas, Leguee makes no secret in her social media posts that she’s not a fan of Trudeau. Her points of frustration include a trade dispute with China over canola, tariffs India placed on peas and lentils and changes to small-business taxes affecting farmers that were made two years ago. Consultations on those changes were done during harvest.

I've honestly never felt so ... not even under-appreciated, just like completely ignored

“Alienation is a feeling,” says Jared Wesley, a politics professor at the University of Alberta. “The rest of Canada risks inflaming the situation if they don’t take Alberta’s concerns seriously.”

But addressing the West’s issues with pipelines and equalization could put party leaders at odds with voters in other seat-rich parts of Canada, he warns.

Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, says intense frustration in the West will galvanize people to cast ballots for the Conservatives and Andrew Scheer. But given that Conservative support is already concentrated in the West, it will create what she calls an inefficiency of votes. Many seats will be won by huge margins.

“You will have Conservative strategists going, ‘Gosh, we wish we had those votes in Ontario,”‘ she says.

“Or we wish we really could have picked up those votes in Atlantic Canada or in Quebec or in British Columbia.”

In the 2015 election, the Liberals saw breakthroughs in Edmonton and Calgary, but polling suggests they could lose those this time around, Kurl says.