Justin Trudeau, a man who can’t remember how many times he darkened his skin for comic effect, has managed to form a minority government in Canada.

His Liberal Party won Monday’s election with fewer votes than the Conservatives but, under a quirk of the first-past-the-post system, emerged 36 seats ahead in the 338-member House of Commons. The Tories took it on the chin. Their leader, a likeable man called Andrew Scheer, conceded graciously.

I should declare an interest: Scheer is a friend, one of a handful of overseas leaders who publicly backed Brexit. I spent a week in Canada watching the election, and came back stunned by the lopsidedness of the political culture. It’s not just that a Right-wing leader who had blacked up would have been hounded out of public life. It’s not just that, had the vote totals been the other way around, we’d never hear the end of it. It’s that the Leftism of the media has fashioned a national ethos.

Like most British Tories, I expect a measure of media bias: immigration good, Israel bad, feminism good, austerity bad etc. But I have never come across such a monolithically partisan commentariat as Canada’s. I watched open-mouthed as one news anchor subjected Scheer to a 30-second harangue about his “lies” before asking: “How do you explain to your five children, from toddler to teenager, that it is OK to lead a dirty campaign?” Stunned, I wrote down her exact words. But no one else seemed surprised and, within a few days, I understood why. A week before polling day, the state broadcaster went so far as to sue the Conservatives for breach of copyright because they (like other parties) had used news footage in an election advertisement.