Spoiling for a fight, Kathleen Wynne has finally found a foil.

Kevin O’Leary is the opponent she dreams of taking down.

When he trash-talks Ontario, it’s music to her well-worn ears — those ears having been bent out of shape by angry voters, and pinched by her provincial opponents.

The premier can’t push back against senior citizens with quavering voices, and it’s tough to pin down her invisible opposition rivals — akin to fighting phantoms.

O’Leary, however, is right out of central casting. The long-running TV personality is now running for the federal Tory leadership, but he went off script by taking a run at Ontario with the usual pot shots.

Not just high hydro bills, but high taxes allegedly driving away auto plants.

Which is why the premier couldn’t resist engaging him — not on a Tory campaign stage, but on the Facebook platform that now hosts fake news and faux debates. The better to bend our ears and bait our eyeballs.

“Dear Mr. O’Leary,” begins her cheeky Facebook post, followed by warm congratulations for entering the den of fire-breathing politicians.

The premier proceeds to pick apart his rhetoric from a talk radio interview in which he claimed carmakers will move to Michigan to pay “30 per cent less in tax, no regulations, no carbon tax.”

But as Republican candidate Mitt Romney reminded Americans in the 2012 presidential debate, Canadian corporate taxes are well below U.S. rates (thanks to dubious reductions by both Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in Ottawa and Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals in Ontario). As Wynne pointed out, the combined federal-provincial rate here is 28.5 per cent, well below the 38.9 per cent that Michigan carmakers pay.

Yes, Ontario is phasing in a form of carbon tax — the cap and trade system pioneered by, ah, California and once advocated by many U.S. Republicans because it blends market pricing with emissions caps. But the system largely exempts industries in trade-sensitive sectors, which is why there hasn’t been a huge clamour about anyone becoming uncompetitive.

Wynne has been on a frustratingly futile fact-checking crusade in recent weeks, railing against Ontario PC Leader Patrick Brown for falsely claiming the province has North America’s highest electricity rates. He says it in the legislature and repeats it in his campaign ads, emboldened by Donald Trump’s success with his own falsehoods in the U.S. presidential election.

Untrue. Yes, electricity is costlier here than in neighbouring Quebec and Manitoba, which are blessed with cheap hydro resources. It’s also cheaper in other provinces that still spew coal, which Ontario phased out over the last decade. But electricity bills are higher in many major American cities, not to mention across Europe.

No matter, because facts don’t matter. Brown keeps repeating what he knows to be untrue, and now O’Leary is getting in on the act — knowingly or out of ignorance.

Alternative facts are the disruptive innovation of politics — less factual than the facts, but just enough truthiness to make the sale and club the competition. Like Trump, O’Leary is good at bluster — but Wynne is betting Canada is a tougher market for false news.

And her government is going all-in: Wynne’s weekend posting was followed Monday by two more letters, from the ministers responsible for energy and the economy, berating him for blustering out of turn (one of them pointed out that electricity bills in Boston, where O’Leary keeps a residence, are 60 per cent higher than the Ontario average).

Why the O’Leary overkill?

First, in a province where people barely know their opposition leaders, a celebrity politician is a target of convenience. It’s a symbiotic slanging match.

Second, this is a dry run for next year’s provincial election, when we will be living in a much different world. A Trump backlash will have taken root, if not in America then assuredly in Canada.

Wynne’s Facebook posting is a sneak peek at her future Liberal talking points — distinguishing Ontario’s social safety net from a post-Obamacare America, a place where governments invest in free tuition and subsidized child care for people on lower incomes, rather than celebrating tax cuts that imperil clean water (think of Flint, Mich. — “no regulations”; and Walkerton, Ont.).

“Your policies so far suggest that serving society’s most well-off should be the sole role of government. I see things differently,” Wynne told him. “I want an Ontario … where everyone who works hard can benefit and where opportunity is shared widely.”

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O’Leary replied to her riposte Monday by daring Wynne to “call an election tomorrow” (perhaps not realizing that we now, ah, have fixed election dates by law). No, he didn’t correct his blooper about Ontario’s corporate tax rates, and why would he?

Politics today is like television and Facebook — you can say whatever you can get away with. But just as good entrepreneurs know what the local market will bear, good politicians remember that all politics is local.

Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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