It's easy to picture Kathleen Wynne recoil at comparisons to Donald Trump.
So why is she stealing his talking points?
On an almost daily basis the Liberal Caucus Service Bureau sends an email bomb to every media outlet in the province. These are light on facts and heavy on the the nasty business of partisan spin.
The theme for these email bombs is Ford’s Fake News. The Wynne team has gone so far as to create a website for your benefit, "to address some of the myths that Conservatives, especially their Leader Doug Ford, have been propagating."
554 false claims tracked to date!
Today's blast shows why most reporters pay them no attention and delete these emails. (Like a certain loyal insider.)
Ford's cuts would "grow to $10 billion a year...his plan would lead to 75,000 job losses ...he would fire at least 7,000 teachers, early childhood educators, education assistants and fire thousands of nurses, doctors, and personal support workers." (Kitten eater! Kitten eater!)
Steady the spin.
The $10-billion in 'cuts' and the firing of all those workers comes by way of a MacLean's column from Prof. Mike Moffatt of the University of Western Ontario. He's also a member of Prime Minister Trudeau's Council of Advisors. When I interviewed him on my show, he admitted: "this is a back-of-the-envelope estimate." Of note too, he once labelled Wynne's high tech job creation strategy "the worst Canadian public policy of 2013."
He can be in both attack ads.
The Liberal team also claims an independent economist, Jim Stanford, looked at the Ford platform and concluded it would lead to '75,000 job losses - at a minimum'. That's curious, since there is no Ford platform. Plus, Jim Stanford isn't an independent economist. He was an economist for Unifor, Canada's largest private-sector union. He lives in Australia now.
Fake News!
Allegations of fake news, undermining the news media is an interesting tactic for the Liberal Party, since truth has never been its strongest trait.
Desperate, they would love nothing more than to cast their leader as the caring, sharing grandmother. The activist centrist with a government program for every social ill. Doug Ford is the ugly populist. Ontario's Donald Trump. And they'll steal Trump's talking points to drive it home.
These are tough times in Liberal land. The party is at historic lows in the polls and a top insider will be spending the spring season in jail, instead of the splendor of Muskoka.
The way things are going, the Liberals will soon promise to build a wall between Etobicoke and Mississauga. And send Doug Ford the bill.
HERE IS TODAY'S PREP:
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