Toronto — Tell me if you’ve heard this before: The spoiled son of a sprawling business dynasty positions himself as an anti-elite populist. During a pivotal campaign, he brushes off a history of crude remarks as political incorrectness to the delight of his base. Then, running against the establishment of his own party and an evidently more qualified female candidate, he loses the popular vote but manages, by way of an arcane voting system, to take power.

No, I’m not rehashing the victory of President Trump. I’m describing the rise of Canadian politician Doug Ford, who this month was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, the right-of-center opposition in the country’s most populous province. With his party leading in the polls ahead of a June 7 election, Mr. Ford has a strong chance of becoming premier.

Trumpism, it seems, has migrated north.

Several years before the 2016 United States presidential campaign, Mr. Ford’s brother, the deceased former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, more or less invented the politics of boorish, divisive populism the American president has since mastered. Rob Ford figured out as early as 2010 that riding out scandal, while blaming the media and other unspecified “elites,” was a winning political strategy.

Torontonians forgave flaws in his character, appreciated them, even embraced them as signs of authenticity. It didn’t matter to his base that he smoked crack cocaine while in office. The Rob Ford era demonstrated that someone as shameless as Mr. Trump had a shot as a political figure.