It was reported by the Toronto Star recently, in the midst of yet another article detailing how the PC Party of Ontario can't walk and chew gum at the same time, that Kathleen Wynne and the Ontario Liberals will be tying Patrick Brown to Donald Trump as part of their re-election strategy.

If this seems insane to you, and if you think that Ontarians are going to laugh it off- because, don't you know, they have been so clear headed and savvy before then you underestimate both the lengths to which Liberals will go to in order to control the narrative and the propensity of Ontarians to go along with that narrative.

Let me posit that the Ontario Liberals who are currently embroiled in several investigations for varying degrees of rule bending or outright breaking believe that they have the God-given right and duty to defend Ontario, and all that is good and right besides, from the rapacious and violent Forces Of Evil currently manifesting themselves in the persona of the current President of the United States of America.

To them, any process that permits the existence or growth of Trump-populism is no process worth following.  Thus, the shameless quotes from them to the effect that nothing was done wrong in each of the matters currently before the courts.  And they are joined in this belief by the Ontarians who reward them with government after government.

And despite the fact that the Liberals control and have controlled Canada in this matter for the majority of its existence, and despite the fact that they have constantly under-delivered when it comes to standing up for average Canadians, the narrative of Liberals exceeding the boundaries of the law in the interests of defending against the much greater threat of Trumpism resonates and will continue to resonate.

So of course they will try to connect Brown, who does not let a day go by without mewling about how "pragmatic" and "inclusive" he is, to Donald Trump.  And of course the Conservatives, despite knowing that this kind of mythmaking and deflection has worked more times than it has not, will laugh and roll their eyes.  Because, for whatever reason, the Conservatives still believe that Ontarians are "rational".  That they will "see through" this deception.

Now, I would go so far as to say that if they were in Trump's America instead of Trudeau's / Wynne's / Motley's Canada the Liberals would be justified in this kind of guerrilla tactics and in this disingenuous posturing as the underdogs.  The continued survival of the ludicrously incompetent Trump, thwarted and resisted at every turn, is the strongest argument I've seen for the deck being stacked against progressives in the United States.

But when I see Liberals, the Natural Governing Party of Canada, portraying themselves as the victims, as the ones who must subvert a supposedly unfair system by any means necessary, it brings to my mind Trump furiously tweeting at his enemies at 3 AM.

It may be that the Liberals are genuinely unaware of how they, and not the PC Party, resemble Trump each time they throw a tantrum about  having to account for their misdeeds.  (The fact that the PC's themselves never explicitly make this connection doesn't help.)

But even if the Liberals aren't doing it deliberately, they certainly aren't interested in changing tactics anytime soon.  Doing that when they have been so successful would be nothing less than irrational.

Written by Josh Lieblein