Kellie Leitch, an Ontario MP and would-be Conservative leader, is taking a hammering for suggesting only immigrants who accept Canadian values should be allowed into the country.

Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose says it’s a bad idea. So does rival leadership candidate and Calgary MP Deepak Obhrai.

Critics accuse the Collingwood physician of trying to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. Ontario MP Michael Chong, who is also contesting the Conservative leadership, has called her proposal “the worst of dog-whistle politics.”

She has been reviled in the country’s editorial pages as an intolerant xenophobe.

But she is sticking to her guns, as she did Thursday on CBC Radio. I suspect that’s because she figures a lot of Conservative Party members — and a fair number of Canadians generally — agree with her.

Immigration is a fraught topic in Canada. We are all immigrants or descended from them. Even the original First Nations came from somewhere else.

But at the same time, large-scale immigration can be unnerving for those who are already here. Just ask those same First Nations.

Canadians like to pride themselves on their ability to tolerate differences. Yet if the public opinion polls can be believed, there are limits to this tolerance.

As the Star reported in July, a province-wide poll commissioned by the Ontario government and the City of Toronto found that 53 per cent of Ontarians think Canada should accept immigrants only from those countries with similar values — which is close to what Leitch wants.

The same poll found that 75 per cent of Ontarians think Muslim values differ from those of other Canadians and that more than half believe that mainstream Islamic doctrines support violence.

Some 46 per cent of those polled said Canada admits too many immigrants.

The survey’s findings jibe with an Angus Reid poll taken earlier this year. It found Canadians are still deeply divided over the Liberal government’s plan to resettle Syrian refugees in Canada, with 52 per cent in favour and 44 per cent opposed.

Ontarians will remember former Premier Dalton McGuinty’s 2005 decision to scrap all faith-based arbitration rather than allow Muslim sharia law to be used in family dispute-settlement cases.

Jews and Roman Catholics had been quietly using faith-based arbitration for years but McGuinty figured — probably correctly — that giving the same status to Muslims would be politically explosive.

In Quebec, meanwhile, the intense debate over so-called reasonable accommodation of cultural minorities — particularly Muslims — has quieted down.

But it hasn’t disappeared. The issue lingers on in the form of a government bill that would require all of those offering and receiving public services to keep their faces uncovered.

All of which is to say that Canadians may not be as welcoming of newcomers as they claim to be.

Leitch has dismissed as unfair any suggestion that her position on immigration echoes that of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.

And there are some differences. She doesn’t want to build a wall along the southern border. He does.

However, there are also similarities. Trump began by calling for a flat-out ban on Muslim immigrants. Now, like Leitch, he has embraced the more subtle notion of limiting immigration to “those who share our values and respect our people”

But let’s not fool ourselves. Both Trump and Leitch are taking aim at the same target here. When Leitch said she wouldn’t allow into Canada those who “believe that gays and lesbians should be stoned,” she was deliberately playing to a stereotypical view of Islam.

The reigning assumption behind Canadian politics today is that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hard-edged approach to Muslim immigrants was counterproductive — that it cost him votes.

Similarly, the reigning assumption behind American politics four years ago was that the Republicans, if they were to win, had to become more immigrant-friendly.

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Yet in the end the Republicans chose the very immigrant-unfriendly Trump.

Can the miracle be repeated? Kellie Leitch hopes so.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

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