EVER since Doug Ford became the leader of Ontario’s centre-right Progressive Conservative Party on March 10th, he has been asked if he is Canada’s Donald Trump. The two have much in common. Big, beefy and blond, Mr Ford inherited a large product-labelling company, yet campaigns against elites who “drink champagne with their pinkies in the air”. He loathes regulation and taxes, and vows to repeal Ontario’s carbon cap-and-trade system. Two books about his late brother Rob, Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, paint the surviving Ford as impulsive, undisciplined, indiscreet and a bully.

However, the comparison falls apart when it comes to immigration. Mr Ford bemoans the loss of 300,000 manufacturing jobs from Ontario, but blames an incompetent Liberal Party, not foreigners. Far from bashing immigrants, he aims to woo socially conservative ones. For example, he wants to repeal a sex-education curriculum for primary schools that lists six genders and four sexual orientations. Many immigrant parents pulled their children from classes when it was launched in 2015.

Even a colour-blind populism could be dangerous. Some of Canada’s new populist leaders are reckless with facts, impatient with legal constraints and make budget-busting promises. And they might win. Polls suggest that Mr Ford will capture the premiership of Ontario, the country’s second-most-powerful office, at an election on June 7th. In Quebec, the party of François Legault, a cultural nationalist, is leading polls for a provincial election in October. And in Alberta, a recently unified party led by Jason Kenney, a conservative accused of sharing Mr Trump’s penchant for “alternative facts”, enjoys a vast lead. National polls tell a similar story. By last month the ruling Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, had fallen into a rough tie with the opposition Conservatives (see chart). After a long spell basking in global adulation as an antidote to Mr Trump, Canada is no longer populist-proof, liberals worry. Political upheaval is not new to Canada. After Canadians declined to join the revolting American colonies, rebellions erupted in Ontario and Quebec in 1837 against appointed leaders who resisted self-rule. A century later, agrarian socialists won control of provincial governments in the western prairies. Nonetheless, occasional victories by political outsiders have mostly been limited to the provinces. Because Canada’s population is concentrated in Ontario and Quebec, federal elections have hinged on the east, where politics have focused on placating Quebec’s separatists. Voters elsewhere had reason to feel ignored. Only in 2006 did a candidate from the hinterlands win by opposing the Montreal-Toronto axis. The dour Stephen Harper did not look like a cowboy populist, but struck a chord by accusing distant overlords in Ottawa of stifling Canada’s energy-rich west with regulation. Moreover, his calls for family values and law and order resonated with immigrants in suburban Ontario as well as with his base in rural Alberta.

Mr Harper spent a decade in power. Once he could no longer run as an outsider, voters swung back to the establishment; Mr Trudeau is the son of a former prime minister. But in office, Mr Trudeau has invited populist scorn, only partly because of his dynastic leg-up. Policy-wise, he enraged the right by planning a national carbon tax and making non-profits applying for grants pledge to support legal abortion. He was also mocked for dressing his family in Bollywood garb on a trip to India, and holidaying on a private Caribbean island.

There is little demand for Trump-style isolationism in Canada. With trade equivalent to 64% of GDP, it would strike voters as absurd. And even a whiff of racial prejudice would be political suicide in a country where 20% of citizens are immigrants (compared with 13% in the United States) and the native-born are obsessed with being nice. Far-right groups are active in every Canadian province, but they are small. Violent zealots, such as the shooter who killed six Muslims in a Quebec City mosque to protest Mr Trudeau’s welcoming of refugees, are even rarer.

Instead of ethnic division, Canada’s populists offer unrealistic fixes. For example, Mr Ford says he will fire the head of Ontario’s electric utility, which the premier cannot do. Mr Kenney wants a referendum on federal revenue-sharing, from which Alberta cannot withdraw. Both promise to pay for tax cuts with unspecified savings. And all populists claim to defend the masses against corrupt elites.

The targets of such attacks vary. In Ontario, where the premier is openly lesbian, Mr Ford’s alpha-male persona appeals to men who find Mr Trudeau’s feminism grating. In Alberta, Mr Kenney—who crafted Mr Harper’s outreach to conservative nonwhites—rails against Ottawa and crony capitalism. And in Quebec, nativism has flourished. Its Francophone residents have long fought to protect their language and culture. Mr Legault may not call immigrants rapists—this is Canada, after all—but he does want to cut their inflow by 20%, and subject them to a “values test”.

The entry of the populists does not ensure an early exit for Mr Trudeau. Andrew Scheer, the federal opposition leader, will need to court culturally anxious Quebeckers, assembly-line workers in Ontario and western cowboys alike—a feat that only Mr Harper has achieved so far. He has sought to keep his party free of unsavoury influences. In January he expelled from his caucus a senator whose website maligned the work ethic of indigenous Canadians. Nonetheless, he will need to win the voters now backing Mr Ford and his ilk at the next election in 2019. Perhaps the best test of the country’s reputation for moderation is whether he can run a competitive race without making ridiculous promises or tarring his opponents as un-Canadian.