OTTAWA — Two astonishing cabinet appointments were among Stephen Harper's first acts as prime minister Monday but they may just be obscuring a far more interesting gambit.

The cabinet - 27 members, including the prime minister - marks another deliberate step toward the pragmatic middle and away from the new Conservative party's ideological roots, say a trio of experts.

All the hue and cry over floor-crossing Liberal David Emerson and unelected, soon-to-be-senator Michael Fortier vaulting straight onto the Tory front bench merely drives home the point.

"This seems to be a clear nod toward quite a pragmatic, centrist style of government," said Allan Tupper, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia.

Put another way, the old grassroots Reform party is dead, dead, dead.

"This is the final transition away from Reform," said Faron Ellis, a career Reform-Alliance-Conservative party chronicler who teaches at Lethbridge Community College. "And I don't say that critically."

Much will be made over the next few days about some of Harper's cabinet selections, not just Fortier and Emerson.

Manitoba's Vic Toews at Justice is raising eyebrows because of his impolitic rants against the Charter and the Supreme Court in his former role as justice critic.

Jim Flaherty at Finance is being remembered as among the most flinty-eyed neo-cons in Ontario's Mike Harris government.

Stockwell Day as public safety minister is still living down his ill-starred stint as Canadian Alliance leader.

"Are we going to get SeaDoos for the Coast Guard now?" joked Heather MacIvor of the University of Windsor, Ont., a reference to Day's penchant for showboating.

But on balance, Harper's first cabinet seems a fiscally conservative, socially moderate model of regional balance, provincial experience and young and old.

Harper said in his first news release as prime minister that the executive is "designed for work, not for show."

But that's only part of the story.

"This cabinet is about the next election as much as it's about the current minority Parliament," said Ellis.

With just three Alberta ministers - and as many from Ontario (nine) as all four western provinces combined - Harper has rejected playing up the old West Wants In slogan.

In fact, with western Liberal MPs having held the finance, health, industry and deputy prime minister jobs under the former Paul Martin government, David Taras of the University of Calgary argues that real cabinet influence has actually shifted east.

Taras also notes that hardline social conservatives have been sidelined, and that longtime party stalwarts - think Diane Ablonczy and Jason Kenney - were excluded from cabinet because of the imperatives of regional balance.

"It may be a message to the party: This is a government and not a party," said the academic.

Even the inclusion of Fortier and Emerson sends a deeper message than the howls of hypocrisy from outraged New Democrats and Liberals suggest. The appointments are a clear warning to the grassroots populists, said Ellis.

Appointing Fortier, an unelected Montreal party activist from the old PC wing, was "dicey," said Ellis.

"But that, combined with Emerson, is going to be a tough one-two punch for a lot of the old Reform constituency to take."

The new prime minister appears ready to take the short-term hit from right and left with an eye to the longer game.

To win a majority in the next election, said the Lethbridge political scientist, Harper needs to win over at least a quarter of the 60 per cent of Canadian voters who didn't support the Conservatives this time around.

"Quite clearly, that comes from Ontario and Quebec - where the votes are."