OTTAWA — Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who has surged into first place in opinion polls, was hammered by opponents Sunday for arguing Canada should keep the Senate because it gives Quebec a big advantage over B.C. and Alberta.

“We have 24 senators from Quebec and there are just six from Alberta and six from British Columbia. That’s to our advantage,” Trudeau said in response to the new NDP push to have the scandal-plagued $91.5-million-a-year upper chamber abolished.

“To want to abolish it, that’s demagogy. It has to be improved,” he said in a story published Saturday in Montreal’s La Presse newspaper.

Critics accused Trudeau of pitting region against region. But Trudeau, in an interview with The Vancouver Sun late Sunday, said it was the Conservatives that were harming western interests by pushing for Senate reforms that merely allow for election of senators.

“Justin Trudeau is tone deaf to western Canadians,” Heritage Minister James Moore, B.C.’s senior minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, told The Sun in a statement. “This isn’t the first time he has insulted the West, it won’t be the last.”

NDP House leader Nathan Cullen said Trudeau’s comments will get a “terrible” reception in the West.

“Mr. Trudeau has made so much about being a unifying figure, so to defend something so indefensible as the Senate under the guise that ‘it’s better for the place where I live’ speaks to the worst motivations,” said Cullen, MP for the northwestern B.C. riding of Skeena-Bulkley Valley. “That’s not unifying. That’s pitting one (region) against another.”

Trudeau said it is Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives who want to hurt B.C. and Alberta by pushing to create an elected Senate without making other changes.

Giving senators additional democratic legitimacy by electing them will make the Senate more powerful. Unless the seat distribution is changed, Trudeau said, that will hurt B.C. and Alberta which are grossly under-represented in the Senate given their populations and economic clout.

“Electing senators will have a terrible impact on the West,” Trudeau told The Sun.

The Canadian Constitution gives B.C. and Alberta only six senators each of the total of 105, while guaranteeing New Brunswick and Nova Scotia 10 senators each.

Trudeau also said he had no apologies for pointing out the current Senate’s benefit for his home province.

“I’m looking out for the interests of all Canadians, there’s no question about that, but 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 of Quebec, or even Quebec as a province.”

He also said it’s not a “big deal” that a national leader would refer to Quebec’s interests as “our” interests while speaking to a Quebec newspaper.

“Politicians are from places and usually if they are a good politician they’re proud of where they’re from,” he said, noting that Harper has proclaimed Calgary as Canada’s top city while Moore promoted B.C. during the 2010 Winter Olympics.