When she was a rookie Conservative MP, trying desperately to make a name for herself in the dystopian political world of Stephen Harper, Kellie Leitch used to open her speeches with the same, tired line.

“You’ll have to excuse me if my beeper goes off while I’m talking to you,” she would say. “That’s because I’m a pediatric orthopedic surgeon on call at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and I never know when there’ll be an emergency.”

Apparently, we were all supposed to be very impressed by somebody being a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Medical titles do have a certain cachet in politics, the way “brain surgeon” used to be synonymous with brilliance and accomplishment. That, of course, was before Dr. Ben Carson became a candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination and convinced us that being a brain surgeon was no barrier to being remarkably dim. (Remember him saying the Holocaust never would have been as deadly if Europe’s Jews had all gotten guns? Or his crackpot theory that the pyramids weren’t the tombs of pharaohs but granaries built by the biblical Joseph?)

Anyway, until fairly recently Leitch seemed incapable of giving a speech or an interview where she didn’t talk about how she was really Dr. Albert Schweitzer first and a politician second. “It’s part of who I am, being a surgeon and taking care of children,” she once said.

That was before Leitch discovered the “values” card as a ticket to political stardom — and found a whole new script. It all started rather catastrophically. In the waning days of the 2015 federal general election, our favorite surgeon and her fellow over-ambitious partner in crime, Chris Alexander, announced plans for a “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line. It got plenty of attention — the wrong kind — was rejected out of hand by thinking people and probably contributed to the Conservatives’ well-deserved defeat.

Leitch now says it was all a big misunderstanding. “We weren’t talking about race, we were talking about kids,” she said a few months ago.

While Harper sometimes played the politics of division, he understood that the only way the Conservatives could hope to win and retain power was by embracing Canada’s growing diversity. While Harper sometimes played the politics of division, he understood that the only way the Conservatives could hope to win and retain power was by embracing Canada’s growing diversity.

Now, as a leadership candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada, Leitch has decided to take another stab at stirring up the cauldron of fear with her “Canadian values” test. She literally wrapped herself in the flag for a recent Maclean’s magazine cover and now is embracing Donald Trump.

It’s all a bit … creepy.

Like Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Front National, Leitch was clearly thrilled with Trump’s election. “Tonight, our American cousins threw out the elites and elected Donald Trump as their next president,” she wrote in a fundraising letter. “It’s an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well.”

So a medical doctor, the daughter of a longtime Conservative organizer, a graduate of Queen’s, University of Toronto and Dalhousie and a member of the party since she was a child is — suddenly, somehow — a woman of the people, a populist of the first order.

Leitch’s crass and calculated moves are clearly paying off. She’s getting plenty of attention and in a poll of Conservatives appears to be on top on the heap, although at an unimpressive 19 per cent.

Her embrace of the values card hijacked the first leadership debate in Saskatoon this week, forcing her opponents to make it clear where they stand. Not surprisingly, Michael Chong — the most principled person in the field — said that Conservatives can only win when they offer an inclusive vision of the country. “Kellie’s policy of singling out newcomers to Canada for special ‘values’ screening by government is a losing strategy.”

Indeed, while Harper sometimes played the politics of division, he understood that the only way the Conservatives could hope to win and retain power was by embracing Canada’s growing diversity. Efforts by Jason Kenney to build support in communities of new Canadians was successful for a time, until the Liberals under Justin Trudeau returned to seize the Liberals’ traditional voter base.

If the Conservatives want to turn themselves into the party of older, rural Canadians, fearful of the diversity that is the new face of Canada’s growing and successful cities … well, fine. That’s their option. They’ll be stuck at 30 per cent of the vote forever, perpetually in opposition.

The Liberals must be thrilled. The next time Kellie Leitch’s beeper sounds, it will be Justin Trudeau urging her to fight on to victory.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.