CALGARY - It was a telling initial reaction from Conservative partisans to the news that their party had just won its second straight minority government.
Blank stares. No sound. Just one person clapping among the hundreds of Conservative partisans crammed into a vast convention hall where leader Stephen Harper was to speak.
Harper would now win any parliamentary vote with the support of just one of the three opposition parties -- precisely the situation he faced before calling the election.
News that their leader would be forced to contend with yet another fractious Parliament clearly left many cold.
His dreams of making Conservatives Canada's natural governing party, of wiping out the Bloc Quebecois, and of capturing the hearts of Quebec nationalist voters? Such lofty visions will have to wait.
The mood became increasingly more festive in subsequent hours as partisans cheered on the election of more than a dozen additional MPs to a more robust Tory minority.
"This is a good night for Conservatives," said Harper minister Jason Kenney.
"We are growing in every region, except possibly Quebec -- and we are still maintaining a strong base there."
But the icy reaction to the initial news spoke to the party's high hopes that this election might have produced the first Conservative majority in two decades.
Those hopes were dashed practically within seconds of the results being announced from Ontario and Quebec, while scores of Tory supporters were still literally entering the convention hall.
Harper becomes only the fourth Conservative since Sir John A. Macdonald to win two successive terms -- and only the second since the feat was achieved nearly a half-century ago by John Diefenbaker.
That's the good news.
The bad news for Harper is that all the others won at least one majority government and -- after three electoral attempts -- he remains shut out from that exclusive club.
Unlike those other men, Harper has failed to unite what longtime adviser Tom Flanagan called the Three Sisters of conservatism: Western populism, Eastern Canadian Tories, and Quebec's "bleu" nationalists.
Harper's party retained its stranglehold on the West. It appeared to make inroads in Ontario and Atlantic Canada, save for a shutout in Newfoundland. But Quebec remained a disappointment.
Party brass were forced to look on in frustration as Quebec remained conservatism's wayward sibling.
Western populism's dominant figure shrugged his shoulders and wondered how Quebecers could possibly have voted on the basis of identity politics when the economy is in such turmoil.
Reform party founder Preston Manning said: "How can Quebec support the Bloc when they're fundamentally weak on economics and always have been?"
Harper had made good on his promise to transfer billions to the provinces. He gave Quebec a special role at the United Nations' cultural forum. He declared the Quebecois a nation.
The party is now left wondering what else it might take to dislodge the Bloc Quebecois in the hearts of nationalist voters. Some will undoubtedly wonder whether it's even worth the effort.
"Something has to change in Quebec. I'm not sure exactly," said Jeremy Doell, a Conservative party member from Cochrane, Alta.
"I mean we've done, the party has done so much for Quebec that I'm not sure why they haven't got on board yet."
But within Tory ranks there are already whispers that Harper's inner circle has only itself to blame for the Quebec debacle, having displayed a tone-deaf approach to the province's political culture.
One partisan shook his head in frustration while listening to former MP Jean Lapierre -- now a television pundit -- describing Harper's Quebec brain trust as a bunch of kids.
Early in the campaign, Harper and his aides were downright dismissive when his arts-funding cuts and law-and-order agenda appeared to be playing badly in the province.
They scoffed that their moves might not be popular in the latte-sipping heart of downtown Montreal but confidently predicted zero impact in the dozens of seats at play in the province's rural heartland.
Their bold predictions bit the dust.
The province's entertainers, artists, and politicians united against the cuts and excoriated the Tories in biting Internet ads, and the Bloc presented itself as the lone defender of Quebecois culture.
The impact of their failure to displace the Bloc could have immediate consequences and more far-reaching ones across the country.
In the short term, Harper will struggle to put together a cabinet with another weak Quebec caucus. The challenge was painfully apparent in his first mandate.
Maxime Bernier was considered enough of a bright light to be named for a brief, gaffe-studded stint as Canada's foreign minister. And Josee Verner was the heritage minister who struggled to explain -- let alone defend -- the arts cuts in her own province.
The longer-term and more far-reaching problem for Harper is the setback Tuesday's result poses to his greatest political dream: making Conservatives Canada's natural governing party.
He and his advisers say they want to reverse the string of Liberal dominance over Canadian politics since the Mackenzie King era.
It would be the same feat achieved in the United States by Richard Nixon, who put an end to Democratic dominance in 1968 by working-class southerners with Wall Street northerners behind Republicans in a potent coalition that has carried seven of the last 10 presidential elections.
Harper alluded to that broader goal early in the campaign when he declared that Canada was becoming a more conservative place.
He cited pride in the military and fiscal conservatism as hallmarks of Canada's new political culture, alongside more liberal achievements like medicare and the Charter of Rights.
