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The Alliance party in Canada was a grass roots conservative party that became the major challenge to the Liberal establisment.
Back in 2000 they elected Stockwell Day as leader.

The problem with this choice was it alienated most of the Canadians who wanted a change and had hither to supported the Alliance as a viable conservative group. There was great hope that the Liberal's would finally be unseated..

However the Alliance elected Stockwell Day...those who were not social conservatives or 'retro-christian/ creationists' believed in my view correctly that he was more theocrat than conservative and simply opted to not vote or to vote the known parties...

The Liberals were returned with a majority.

thats the long and short of it....

I am not that familiar with Canadian politics. Could you elaborate?

We used to have two conservative parties. Progressive conservative, which were what is now called paleo-con on FR. Fiscally conservative, but no real firm stand on social issues. The other went by various names, but was the religious group. The PCs were down and out. Stockwell Day was the leader of the religious conservatives. We also have two left wing parties, center left, and way out in left field. A conservative effort from what was essentially one party, the other was down and out remember, could defeat them. But the center left party managed to put the religious nutjob label on Stockwell, mostly Stockwell's fault. They lost. Now we are about to go at it again with a corrupt center left government, a single united right wing party that would probably be called center-left by an American, and still a way out in left field party. If the center left party paints the new leader as a creationist religious nut, a la the old Stockwell party, the people who planned to vote for the way out in left field party will vote for the center left corrupt party to prevent the right wing religious nut party from gaining power. You know, this is kind of depressing! Anyways, the new conservative leader is being very careful to avoid the creationist/too religious label.

Stockwell Dat lead the Alliance (a conservative, federal party based in the western provinces). The Liberal party used his Christianity against him by basically scare mongering Canadians into thinking he was going to evangelize Canada to his form of Christianity. It worked. Canadians reject mixing religion with politics and it is a strike against anyoine running on the 'morals' platform there.