In a new fundraising email, Conservative leadership candidate Steven Blaney sticks up for his ideological soulmate Kellie Leitch and accuses rival Maxime Bernier of picking on her in this week’s Moncton debate.

In an email sent to supporters following the leadership debate Tuesday, Blaney says, “What’s going on with Maxime Bernier?”

“Last night, he ridiculed our colleague Kellie Leitch and insulted President-elect Trump by saying: ‘I don’t know why she is playing a karaoke version of Donald Trump.’

“Was that a joke?”

Early in the leadership race, Leitch at first denied that she was espousing Trump’s divisive and inflammatory campaign style, but later embraced the similarities between her proposal to screen immigrants for “anti-Canadian values” and Trump’s nativist, anti-immigration campaign after Trump won the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election. Blaney himself has been mining that same seam of identity politics, proposing early in the campaign to bar voters from wearing face veils while voting and threatening to use the Constitution’s ‘notwithstanding clause’ if the Supreme Court should strike the ban down.

“What an awkward way to start a relationship with the newly elected president of our largest trading partner,” Blaney writes in the email. “He even said that Canada doesn’t need another Donald Trump. Why?

“Isn’t it normal to be concerned about border security, or preserving our Canadian identity? Does he feel that the millions of Americans who voted Trump are a ‘basket of deplorables?'”

Bernier’s campaign said Blaney is attacking him because “Bernier is ahead. That’s why other campaigns are attacking him.”

Blaney’s email continues by saying that “mocking colleagues” who have concerns and insulting Trump “the leader of our biggest friend and ally is not a great starter.”