Which candidate urges conservatives to abandon their flirtation with Quebec nationalists, in favour of a frank appeal to the province's federalists -- again, traditional Liberal voters? Which candidate quotes Pierre Trudeau, supports the Charter of Rights and even argues for a stronger federal role in some areas?

Answer: Stephen Harper. The bilingual former Reform MP has been depicted as the narrow extremist in the bunch, the unbending doctrinaire who would turn the party into an "NDP of the right." Yet the positions he has taken to date, notably in his weekend speech in Montreal, paint an altogether different picture. Unbending he may be, but the substance of his campaign is aimed straight at the median voter. If he is disinclined to cut a deal with the Joe Clark Tories, it is because he sees a shorter, more direct route to the centre: through the right wing of the Liberal party.

His Montreal speech is the most striking example. The Liberal lock on federalist votes in Quebec is one of the great constants of Canadian politics, obliging conservatives -- so they thought -- to pitch their tent for the province's nationalists. From at least the time of Robert Stanfield, conservatives have experimented with various appeals to the nationalist vote, from deux nations to distinct society. Even the Reform Party, though it rejected special status, fell into much the same trap, offering instead Preston Manning's "Troisieme Voie" of generalized devolution. It hasn't worked -- or when it has, as Mr. Harper points out, it has proved viciously unstable, invariably ending in disaster. "The broad lesson of history," he notes, "is that Canada's natural governing coalition always includes the federalist option in Quebec, not the nationalist one" -- as was true of the Liberals for much of the 20th century, and of the Conservatives in the 19th. The Alliance's Quebec strategy, in case anyone missed his point, should be to make itself "acceptable to a significant number of Liberal as well as anti-Liberal voters." Mr. Harper's leadership, then, would herald a historic shift -- not only in conservative politics but in the politics of the country. Or perhaps he is calculating that that shift is already under way: that with the coming death of separatism, national unity will cease to be the Liberals' trump card, just as defence lost its potency as an issue for the Republicans after the Cold War.

But Mr. Harper's message is aimed not only at voters in Quebec, or even primarily: The party's chances there are remote, and are likely to remain so for some time. Rather he has his eyes on centre-right voters in Ontario. Mr. Harper calls them "Harris Liberals": those who vote for Mike Harris's robust brand of Conservativism at provincial elections, only to vote Liberal federally. But another term might be Trudeau Reformers.

There is much more overlap than is commonly realized between moderate Alliance voters and right-wing Liberals. What these voters want is a federal government that knows its place, but won't sell the store to the provinces. Until now the Liberals have been just conservative enough to tempt them, while the Alliance has not been nearly federalist enough. But let the Alliance go federalist, just as the Liberals are straying from the fiscal conservative path, and suddenly those votes are up for grabs.

Unfortunately, Mr. Harper carries some heavy baggage on this point, after his notorious public tantrum in the wake of the Alliance's defeat in the last election. In an op-ed piece for the National Post, and in an open letter to the Premier of Alberta, he argued the Alliance's failure to break through in Ontario marked a "rejection" of the West by central Canadian voters, that indeed Albertans could only be protected from this alien majority by erecting a "firewall" of reclaimed provincial powers.

The Montreal speech is a clear attempt to row back from some of these intemperate remarks. The "firewall" is here reinterpreted as simply a restatement of the "watertight compartments" theory of federalism -- the notion that there is a bright line to be drawn between federal and provincial jurisdictions, as wholly separate spheres, inviolable. Mr.

Harper tendentiously claims this strict division of powers was the intent of the Fathers of Confederation (Reservation? Disallowance? Peace, Order and Good Government?), but never mind: It's nothing that, say, Stephane Dion couldn't live with. And it implies no constitutional change.

Indeed, Mr. Harper's position on language policy puts him somewhere to the Trudeau side of Mr. Dion: He is critical of Bill 101, though he will leave it to the courts to prune its excesses. And while generally rendering unto the provinces what the Constitution assigns to the provinces, he says he wants to see "a stronger federal government" within its own fields of jurisdiction. Is this just lip service? Mr. Harper drops this tantalizing hint: "Our economic union is too weak because Ottawa has failed to use the powers it has under the Constitution to ensure that goods and services can freely flow across provincial borders." Is Mr. Harper saying he would use those powers? Paris was worth a Mass. An economic union would be well worth a firewall.