I’M TELLING YOU, IN THIS AREA, THERE’S NO QUESTION IN MY MIND, IT WOULD DEFINITELY FLY.

you’re asking me if I’m speaking sort of the same language as Mr. Trump, I’m talking about a number of the same issues because what I’m hearing from Canadians are similar concerns.”

It’s clear, for some of her supporters at least, mimicking Trump is a virtue, not a sin. “I think Donald Trump is the best thing that could have ever happened to America,” said Correia. What isn’t as clear is whether that message can resonate beyond a particular fringe. speaking to those voters. Like Trump, she pushes hard for natural resource development, including pipelines, that would employ the blue-collar set. On her Fox appearance, she referenced a “globalist, open-border agenda,” using language lifted from anti-trade nationalists in Europe and the United States.

But Leitch herself remains decidedly pro-trade. " I think that we’re a trading nation,” she said. “There’s only so many Canadians and we have an opportunity to expand the opportunities for small- and mediumsized businesses when we have fair and open trade.” She stands by the pro-trade record of the Conservative government she has served in. She’s pro NAFTA, pro-Trans-Pacific Partnership, pro-free trade with the European Union.

Her appeal, then, is to a narrower slice of the Trump constituency, among general election voters.”

That’s not to say there is no constituency at all for that message in Canada. Compared to Europeans and Americans, Canadians are still relatively open to things like foreign investment, immigration and multiculturalism, according to pollster Frank Graves, the president of Ekos Research. But that support is not as strong as it once was, and it’s been going down for years. “A lot of people think Canada doesn’t have the same forces that produced Trump or Brexit,” Graves said. “It absolutely does. They’re a little bit muted, but they’re here.”

That audience is also disproportionately concentrated among Conservative supporters, the people Leitch needs to capture the leadership. Graves polled Canadians on support for Donald Trump in November. A significant majority of Liberal, NDP, Green and Bloc supporters disapproved of the job he was doing as president-elect. But a majority of Conservative supporters — 57 per cent — approved. So when the Leitch team flicks at Trump’s themes or parrots his campaign, they aren’t necessarily poisoning the well, at least not the one they need to drink from right now.

Tim Powers, a longtime Conservative strategist and outspoken Leitch critic, believes at the very least she could use the Trump message to sell memberships. “I probably have responded as strongly as I have because I believe that they have the potential to win by playing off fears and discontent and misunderstandings,” he said. "I think I’m not alone in that. There is still a good portion of Canadian society that harbours an older, traditional version of the country. And some of that traditional version is good and some of it is not so good.”

There are also those in other parties who will admit, quietly, that Canadians of all stripes are not nearly as allergic to nationalist anti-immigrant messages as some would like to pretend. One senior Liberal said the party’s own internal polling shows that Canadians on the whole don’t love immigration, and that even on the refugee issue that captivated and helped turn the last election in the Liberals’ favour, the polling was pretty mixed.

“It would be a folly to pretend that there isn’t a market for the Canadian values message. There just is,” said Jason Lietaer, a Conservative communications strategist who ran the party’s war room in the 2011 campaign. “And it’s not just in rural Ontario, rural Canada either. We’re not the United States. It’s a different market, different message, different culture, different everything. But there is a market for this. And she’s betting on what the size of that market might be.”

Lietaer believes Leitch may find particularly fertile ground for her message in Quebec, where debates over cultural values, immigration and assimilation have raged for years. The Conservative Party actually won more votes and more seats in Quebec in 2015 than it did in 2011. Many attribute that marginal bump, concentrated in the Quebec City region, to the prominence of the debate over the niqab in the campaign.

“A student of mine told me, a few months later, that he had been working as an election worker and he said that the words at the end of the campaign were “niqab, niqab, niqab,” said Louis Massicotte, a political scientist at Laval University. “The general feeling here was that it was a good idea for the Conservative candidates to raise this issue.”

For Leitch, whose French remains lacklustre, cultural values could be a way in to the crucial francophone voter pool. In the lead up to the recent Frenchlanguage leadership debate, she spent several weeks straight in Quebec, much of it concentrated in the Quebec City region. “I wouldn’t say this is a provincewide phenomenon, but certainly in some parts of Quebec, the kind of areas that vote federally for the Conservative Party... Welland, Ont., resident Tom Napper looks at an abandoned John Deere factory he worked at for 32 years.